Sweet Tea
BUDDY GUY
(Silvertone)
This is the blues legend's foray into the spooky sounds of the drone blues indigenous to the Mississippi hill country — filtered through his own muse, of course. Guy sets aside the 12-bar format indigenous to Chicago, where he made his bones, and digs into one-chord drones and licks, which gives him more harmonic freedom to cut loose with some hair-raisingly intense, almost violent, solos. The production is bathed in echo, lending an even more sinister air. Sweet Tea is one of Guy's lesser known records, but it's one of his most masterful and original.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2007.