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Live review: Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington
Back in his hometown of New Orleans, one of the fun things to do is to go see Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington play a little uptown bar called the Maple Leaf. The stage fronts on a big bay window, and when Washington and his band, the Roadmasters, crank it up, you can look through the window and see people dancing on cars up and down the street.
Washington didn’t excite quite that level of fervor on Friday, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. A journeyman guitarist and vocalist whose professional affiliations go back to Johnny Adams (‘The Tan Canary’), Lee Dorsey and Irma Thomas, Washington has created a solid and durable body of work as a leader based on an elastic fusion of blues, soul, funk and an ineffable Crescent City groove. All of those qualities were on display during his ACL set, which hopscotched from a scorching instrumental funk track that opened the show to a sugar-sweet quiet-storm style ballad, ‘Sada’ and a nimble cover of The Delfonics’ ‘Start All Over Again.’
Playing guitar lines that managed to sound both stinging and sweetened (he’s from the T-Bone Walker/Gatemouth Brown school), Washington also took home sartorial style points, looking downright demonic in head-to-toe scarlet, from his red Kangol cap to the incarnadine patent leather shoes — and flame-red Gibson Chet Atkins guitar, of course.
One could see the band lock into place from the opening bars of the first song, tossing one another looks as the pieces jigsawed into place. At one point, a little guitar figure Washington played pleased him so mightily that he said, ‘I gotta do that again’ — and proceeded to do so. It was an oddly engaging moment, an interlude where a guitar lifer can still discover, almost by accident, why he still finds himself onstage night after night.
Larry Kolvoord photo
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