[PLEASE NOTE: This ordering portal (and price) is for USA ONLY. Unfortunately, due to exorbitant postage rates, I am no longer able to ship CDs to addresses outside the USA.]
Every now and then, a new blues act comes along that breaks the mold, putting its own distinctive spin on the music.
Satan and Adam, a Harlem street duo and Living Blues cover story back in the 1990s, was such an act. Satan & Adam, a Netflix documentary, tells that story—the odyssey of guitarist/percussionist Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee and harmonica player Adam Gussow, a creative partnership that endured over the decades.
Now another one-of-a-kind act, Sir Rod & The Blue Doctors, has been born. Gussow and his Mississippi-based Blues Doctors duo have teamed up with Sir Rod Patterson, an Atlanta-area singer, dancer, and motivational speaker who happens to be Sterling Magee's nephew.
It was the Satan & Adam documentary that led Rod to contact Adam, a fateful conversation late in 2019 that quickly brought the two men together. Magee had lived with Rod and his mother Ollie--Sterling's sister--for a couple of years in the early 1980s, not long before Gussow hooked up with him in Harlem. Rod, watching the film on Netflix, realized that he and Adam were both mentored into the blues by the same master musician.
"Star Child" was Magee's nickname for young Patterson. And Sir Rod—as he's known in Atlanta's schools for his anti-bullying crusades—lives up to the title. An incredibly dynamic performer who specializes in the music of Ray Charles, James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Michael Jackson, he's a seamless fit with the Gussow/Gross rhythm machine.
Featuring Patterson up front, Gussow on amplified harmonica and drums, and Alan Gross on guitar, Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors offer a powerful mix of down-home blues, old-school soul, and uptown funk. Their debut album, Come Together, features Satan and Adam favorites, including "I Want You," "Sanctified Blues," and "Seventh Avenue," stirred together with "What'd I Say," "I Feel Good," "Little Red Rooster," plus the catchy jam-band single, “Come Together,” a Gussow-Patterson original that speaks prophetically to the COVID-19 crisis and the virus of racism.
"Freedom for my People," an anthem of Magee's that preaches hope and cries out against injustice, is one of the album's high points, a showcase for Sir Rod's soulful vocals. "So Mean," another Patterson original, is an aching slow blues--just the singer and his keyboard, crying out to the woman he loves, with Gussow seconding the feeling on acoustic harp.
Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors. We can change the world.
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