Scott Henderson
Well To The Bone

I have never concealed my aversion to "pure" Blues albums post-1970s and I have never done anything to hide this antipathy of mine. I've always had the feeling that after the treatment received in the "early seventies" by people like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Alvin Lee (crazy guitarist of Ten Years After), the original music of African American slaves had reached the "point of no return": the violent fusion with Rock imposed upon Blues by the aforementioned three musicians has impressed upon me the idea that it was indeed Rock that had assumed the prevailing character of the new course, and that Blues would be, from then on, a chromosome no longer dominant in the subsequent evolution of the species, in other words, a style reduced to an expressive atmosphere more than an underlying musical philosophy.

On the other hand, I am deeply in love with Scott Henderson, a brilliant Fusion and Jazz-Rock guitarist, leader of Tribal Tech (a group founded in 1984 with the immense Gary Willis on bass) and trusted "sideman" for influential jazz musicians like Joe Zawinul (remember Weather Report?), Chick Corea, and Jean Luc Ponty, to name a few, as well as a solo artist of undisputed creativity and talent.
I was long debated about whether to purchase his latest work, dated 2002. I was well acquainted with his first solo album, "Dog Party" (1994), an album celebrated by "Guitar Player" (the international bible of us guitarists) as the best Blues album of the year, and I have no difficulty confessing that I did not like it at all. So I visited his website for more information and found Scott stating: «It's not really a Blues album, even though for sure it's 'bluesy'».
Believing my Darwinian theory on Blues fully applied and trusting Scott's words (and a preliminary listen...) I then solidified the idea of acquiring it. After various listens, I can say I was not disappointed, but neither was I completely fascinated.

"Well to the Bone" is an album that stands far from the pursuit of daring solutions. On the contrary, it is a well-crafted work that, suspended between multiple musical eras, attempts the difficult bridge between originality and tradition and between the necessary presence of novelty with the re-proposition of inevitably "already heard" environments.
The trio composed of Scott, John Humphrey on bass, and Kirk Covington on drums generates an interesting balance of rhythm and melody. The tension of the classic Blues scheme (shuffle rhythm and pentatonic scales) is not overused nor disrupted, rather orderly recomposed into new schemes. I consider the strength of the album precisely the fact of not excessively indulging in shuffle (actually almost absent) as the base tempo and not always resorting only to the alteration of the third and seventh degree of the diatonic scale to achieve the canonical "blue note" effect.
The trio tries to adapt to the modernity of our times with imperceptible but continuous modifications, repeated in succession, which without overthrowing the twelve-bar Blues, question the entire architecture of the song. I consider the best moments of the album to be "Devil Boy", sung by Wade Durham and seemingly extracted directly from Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland", "Dat's Da Way It Go", same singer but in a hilarious funky context, and "That Hurts", the most devoted passage to the fifties in the entire album.

Sure, it's an album you can do without, how can I say no, but I am not regretting the purchase. Henderson plays divinely as usual, always clean and functional to the songs, and never too invasive towards the other two instrumentalists, as his role as the project leader and songwriter might allow him. The overall sound is well-studied, and the production is not bad.
But there's something nevertheless that doesn't fully satisfy me. It could be my prejudices on contemporary Blues that I illustrated above. It might be because, in my opinion, Scott reaches his maximum expressiveness in a more Jazz realm.

I don't know exactly, but what I can say for sure is that it's definitely not an album devoid of ideas and quality. I have a doubt: could it be that it is I who may not be up to it?