Joe Tatton and his Trio drop jazzy-bluesy new album ‘Big Fish’
Big Fish, the new album from Joe Tatton Trio, is in large part a tribute to the legendary, late bluesman from Mississippi Mose Allison: his sardonic songs as well as his great piano playing style.
What began with Joe and his trio basically playing full live sets of the great man’s music soon turned into Joe writing his own compositions in the vein of Mose. Songs that had that same ironic and humorous view of life as Allison, but updated to the 21st century. Needing to find the way and place to record them, Joe managed to carve some time in between gigs with The New Mastersounds to book a few days at a studio near Nashville, The Rockhouse, run by Grammy winning engineer Kevin Mckendree. He hooked up with a couple of Nashville session musicians, Steve Mackie on upright and electric bass and Kenneth Blevins on drums, and put down all his original songs and also a cover of Mose Allison‘s “Ever Since The World Ended”. The latter sounding as relevant today in the COVID lockdown age as it did back in the 1950s when it was written, a time when the Cold War threatened to get hot and end the world with nuclear armageddon.
There’s the banging northern soul groove of “Just Don’t Stop” (featuring The Haggis Horns), and the satirical title track “Big Fish” (about being a jazz musician in the middle of nowhere) with it’s New Orleans swagger (where Joe has played so many times for JazzFest, Mardi Gras and New Years Eve). There’s the very Mose-esque “Timeline”, a satirical lament to social media that also came out on 45, and some cracking instrumentals featuring the supreme jazz flautist G-LOCK (Gareth Lockrane) tearing it up.
Big Fish out on CD / Digital on April 29th 2022 and on LP TBA via Rodina Music
