Still moving

"Aside from being first lieutenant in Robert Plant's band, the Sensational Space Shifters, guitarist Justin Adams boasts a notable history producing luminaries like Malian group Tinariwen, Gambia's Juldeh Camara and, most recently, Puglian ensemble CGS (Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino). Hence this sparky duet with CGS singer, violinist and percussionist Mauro Durante. Recorded straight to tape with no overdubs, Still Moving proves a thrilling, spontaneous affair, switching between the laments and love songs of southern Italy and the gritty blues of North Africa and North America. Adams is an astonishing player, able to summon a mood of angst with a few reverberating chords of desert blues before a jolt into John Lee Hooker boogie, as he does on opener Dark Road Down, where the two men raise voices against a war-torn world of "trouble and pain ... A bravura performance"".

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"Given the long proud history of blues guitar wranglers, how do you make the music of the Delta sound fresh and surprising? One answer, it turns out, is to take it on a trip to Puglia in southern Italy. Guitarist Justin Adams found common cause there with a fiddle and percussion-playing star of the local pizzica folk tradition ... Ancient frame drum and the soaring fiddle of Mauro Durante (...) mesh mesmerically with the raw, gutsy playing and occasional singing of Adams ... On 'Djinn Pulse' or 'Cupa Cupa' they decelerate to conjure hypnotic beauty".

"Top of the world" - "This album with Mauro Durante (...) ranks among [Adams'] finest achievements. The opener 'Dark Road Down' starts with a haunting desert blues guitar motif that swiftly turns into a ZZ Top boogie before Durante sings a keening melody on which the zephyrs carry the chants of the Maghreb across the sea to the heel of southern Italy. There are traditional Italian work songs (...) as well as original compositions on which the duo create a heady Mississippi-to-Mediterranean blues trance with influences as diverse as garage rock and avant-garde contemporary classical thrown in for good measure. Adams' prowess as a guitarist is well known but what surprises here is the emotional power of his deep, bluesy voice, which suggests he learned a thing or two about singing during the years backing Robert Plant ... One of the albums of the year".