Blue Blood (2001)

Blue Blood was released in the same year as James Blood Ulmer’s epic collaboration with Willie Dixon and Vernon Reid, Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis). Blue Blood is a collaboration with Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, and Amina Claudine Myers. Less concerned with Memphis bloodlines, inevitably it is also less fiery. What surprised me was a religious note running through much of it that left me wondering whether Ulmer is an avowed Christian (as opposed to the more general “spiritual person”). In album opener “O Gentle One,” an Ulmer song, he declares, “I believe in God and all of his creatures” and goes on to provide detail: “He’s the one, the only one.... He made the heavens and the Earth, in six days and nights. He made me, and you. Ain’t that out of sight?” Two songs later, on “99 Names,” he is back at the work of exalting the Lord. I didn’t count them, it might actually be 99, but it’s stuff like the Absolver, the Conqueror, the Restorer, the Provider, the One and Only Merciful and Compassionate King, etc. We’re talking about the Bible God again and even more specifically our old friend the jealous Old Testament God. Blue Blood is just altogether more pious than I expected from the guy doing Memphis sessions with the actual breathing Willie Dixon that same year, but maybe it just goes to show ... something. I see I picked up this CD at a used-CD place I used to frequent. The Bible God theme recurs often in Blue Blood in many ways, but not exclusively or even overbearingly. Some references are more subtle than others. To be clear, I don’t hear “O Gentle One” as subtle. Many of these songs have little if anything to do with God, some are at least mostly instrumental, and finally this album is approximately as warm as I’ve ever heard Ulmer. He is still found rumbling in with his electric guitar flashes of musical bent barbed wire, as on “As It Is.” He offers up a sweltering luxurious turn on “On and On.” And “Momentarily” is a lighthearted romp on a gorgeous soaring melody. Heartfelt pleas for unity on “We Got to Get Together” are made more bitingly sincere with lines like “I’ve seen my people kicked in the face,” not letting anyone off the hook yet for purposes of unity. It’s a funny interesting mixed bag we get from Ulmer in Blue Blood, and one I’ve been more inclined to listen to over the Memphis sessions, for whatever reason. Worth a try, I’d say.