Lightnin' Hopkins - Lightnin' In New York

180-gram vinyl

Remastered by Bernie Grundman

Tip-on jacket

Early '60s improv jazz and blues titles on Candid return to print!

Reissue program starts with five expertly remastered albums of jazz and blues

The original Candid record label lasted a mere four years, from 1960 to '64, and its 30-some LPs played a worthy role in fusing the period's music — mainly modern jazz but also blues — with the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The label's catalog has been acquired by Exceleration Music, whose reissue program starts with five expertly remastered albums: We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite (featuring Coleman Hawkins, Olatunji, and Roach's wife, Abbey Lincoln), Lincoln's Straight Ahead, and Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus plus, from the blues, Lightnin' Hopkins in New York and Otis Spann Is the Blues. The reissues include prescient notes by the original label's producer and A&R man, noted critic and author Nat Hentoff.

The American Candid label has achieved a near legendary status among the critics and the International jazz and blues public. The series was born in 1960 when Archie Bleyer, owner of the Cadence label decided to indulge his love of jazz and blues and create his own line — called Candid. Bleyer recruited Hentoff to produce the series.

Lightnin' Hopkins's audience, like Spann's, was then expanding to include White northeasterners, a transition beyond his fellow Black Texans that he seems to have been navigating with quiet grace on Lightnin' In New York, an eight-track, 43-minute studio disc recorded on his first trip of any length to New York.

He was so happy with this Nov. 15, 1960, session that he proposed extending it to allow him to play the studio's piano - an infrequent instrument on his discs - even managing to do both piano and acoustic guitar (no overdubs) on "Take It Easy," which is resequenced to begin the album. "Lightnin's Piano Boogie"is exactly that. Hentoff's candid liner notes and elements of Hopkins's tales may raise some eyebrows 62 years after the fact, but they're rock solid.

In the late 1980s, Black Lion Records in England bought the Candid catalog, subsequently selling it to U.S.-based Exceleration Music, where jazz drummer Terri Lynne Carrington is involved with A&R.

 

 

1. Take It Easy

2. Mighty Crazy

3. Your Own Fault, Baby, to Treat Me the Way You Do

4. The Trouble Blues

5. Lightnin's Piano Boogie

6. Wonder Why

7. Mister Charlie

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