March 2, 2004

Down Home Blues, from Deep in the Mississippi

oneliness, wandering and death - the stuff of deep blues - were familiar companions when Charlie Musselwhite performed at Joe's Pub on Feb. 25.

Mr. Musselwhite, who was born in Mississippi in 1944, got his musical education in two blues capitals, Memphis and Chicago, and has been a respected harmonica player since the 1960's. Although he has taken side trips into rock, jazz and Cuban music, he has always stayed close to the blues.

His set drew on his next album, "Sanctuary" (Real World), which is due for release on April 6, and it distilled the blues in songs from Ben Harper, Randy Newman, Townes Van Zandt and "The Gospel at Colonus." For an encore, he played a tune of his own, named after the Mississippi back road where his family cemetery is: "Route 19." It was a brief, unhurried harmonica solo conjuring train whistles and solitary desolation.

Mr. Musselwhite often reserved his harmonica for the finales of his songs. First he sang, in a voice seasoned and conversational, understating stark sentiments like the ones in his own song "My Road Lies in Darkness." Then he let his harmonica take over, probing the songs with jabbing riffs, low moaning notes and quivering bends. He went for pithiness, not flash. Every phrase was a wordless epigram, and each note had a precisely weighted tone: sharp or hollow, airy or thick, as if Mr. Musselwhite knew every reed of every harmonica intimately.

Mr. Musselwhite brought with him the band that made "Sanctuary": Charlie Sexton (from Bob Dylan's band) on guitar, Jared Nickerson on bass and Michael Jerome on drums. They had considered every arrangement, touching on rural slide guitar, Chicago blues and near-psychedelic drones (in Mr. Sexton's "The Neighborhood"), planning how a guitar tremolo would mesh with a harmonica trill. It sounded like a roadhouse band with chamber-music finesse, and it reached inside every song.