Album Review: Jim Kweskin & The Berlin Hall Saturday Night Revue, ‘Doing Things Right’
In the early 1960s, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band stood at the fount of what has since become known as Americana music, blending jug band and string band sounds with folk, blues, jazz, western swing, and boogie-woogie, and ragtime. An innovative guitarist, Kweskin continues to collaborate with hosts of musicians to capture the frolicking sounds of the string band music that kept audiences in dance halls jumping on Saturday nights or flocking to medicine shows in the early part of the twentieth century. The Berlin Hall Saturday Night Revue developed from the his bassist and producer Matthew Berlin, whose grandfather had a dancehall in 1930s Newport News, Virginia. The Revue is composed of Berlin, Dobroist Cindy Cashdollar, vocalist Samoa Wilson—Kweskin’s niece—fiddler Matt Leavenworth, blues singer Racky Thomas, trumpeter Annie Linders, and drummer Steve Langone.
The jumping tongue-in-cheek “Four or Five” leads off the album with its scampering fiddles, rolling piano runs, strutting trumpets, and scatting call and response vocals; every instrumentalist stretches out for a turn around the song’s melody, producing a can’t-sit-still groove perfect for a night of spinning around the dance floor. Wilson takes the lead vocals on the “When I Grow too Old to Dream,” which opens as an airy ballad before it shifts into a high energy New Orleans second-line strut. On the hopping ragtime blues “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” Thomas captures the singer’s desire to find safe haven in his room, while Wilson’s smoky vocals wash over us in the languorous lounge song “What’ll I Do.” The Revue slips and slides across the floor to the rhythms of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” stirring up a soul stew of New Orleans jazz and Caribbean swing. Bright twinkling piano notes and runs course under a muted trumpet on Kweskin’s twirling take on the American pop standard “Mona Lisa,” while shimmering guitars flow beneath Wilson’s vamps on “I Get the Blues When It Rains.” The album closes with a Western swing version of the classic “Right or Wrong.”
Doing Things Right lives up to its title as Jim Kweskin and the Berlin Hall Saturday Night Revue shuffle, strut, and swing their way through the 14 songs in this vibrant, jumping collection.
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Doing Things Right is available HERE.
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