How Late'll Ya Play 'Til?

About

Recorded June 18 and 19, 1976, at the Great American Music Hall, <i>How Late’ll Ya Play Til?</i> combines the best of David Bromberg’s interests. The album is Bromberg’s kind of party: a backyard bluegrass session with a hint of inebriated Dixieland blues. His horn-driven cover of “Sweet Home Chicago” has the rollicking spirit of The E Street Band, but Bromberg is much more of an oddball than Springsteen. He’s a master of dynamics—witness the distance from the viscous jamming of “Sloppy Drunk” to the pin-drop silences of “Come on in My Kitchen”—but even his traditional material carries a streak of proud perversion. The album’s centerpiece is an epic solo rendition of the 1928 blues song “Bullfrog Blues.” The performance is part harrowing short story, part theatrical comedy routine, and part folk tale. For all its juicy details, it's essentially a very long set-up with a killer punchline, one that turns the long-running blues cliché of a double entendre inside out. Like the other performances on this loose and lusty concert album, “Bullfrog Blues” shows that Bromberg, like all the great bluesmen, is as witty as he is lascivious.

via Apple Music

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