If you’re a blues buff and feel like you need a refresher/primer on the genre’s rich 150 year history in America, you could thumb through some vast encyclopedias or attend 100 lectures. Yet you’ll never get a better sense of the form’s magical, rootsy diversity than you will immersing for an hour in Bluesville, the sublime, swinging, sultry and soulful new album by Swingadelic, known as NYC Metro’s Greatest Little Big Band – which has been holding court in the Big Apple for 22 years, to the tune of 100 dates a year and a now eight year residency at the prominent supper club Swing 46.
Closing in on a prolific decade of recording with the Zoho label, the multi-faceted 17-piece ensemble founded by upright bassist Dave Post explores and re-imagines an expansive range of classics, breathing torchy, romantic, hard-swinging and hard-rockin’ new life into a fanciful repertoire of classics popularized over the last century by the likes of the Count Basie Orchestra, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Mose Allison, Doc Pomus and Duke Ellington.
Not that anyone would dare dub a group this sensitive, whimsical and inventive with arrangements a “cover band,” but for good measure, they include the Cal Tjader-Quincy Jones inspired 60’s style strut “El Blues Esa Mujer” (composed by Post) and the fast-chugging Post-Andy Reidel tune “Riff’n on McGriff’n,” featuring the wild Hammond B-3 energy of Kyle Koehler.