Carousel Corner.

A bad Saturday night in Detroit is when the Tigers lose a close one at CoAmerica Park. A good Saturday night in Detroit is hitting the blues clubs that dot the town and its `burbs. There is no such thing as a bad blues night in Detroit.

One Saturday this August, B.J. and I went up to Car City Records in St. Claire Shores, where one can find almost any CD by any local artist and which has a huge room of used vinyl that would have guys like TL drooling like toddlers with Zwieback. It was only luck that we picked up The Butler Twins and the Hasting Street Blues Band before seeing Clarence Butler and Connie Tate later that evening. We also got almost the rest of the CDs that make up this month's collection. Then it was time to figure out who we were going to see that night after taking our wives to dinner. Jim McCarty was playing a solo gig at the Down River Lounge in Taylor--too far. Ditto Kenny Parker at Sisko's on the Boulevard, also in Taylor. Doug Deming and the Blue Suit Band were at the Belleville Grill in Belleville, and somebody else was at the Magic Bag. Our favorite hangouts, The Soup Kitchen and Sparky Herbert's, had closed their doors.

B.J. and I decided to see guitarist Bobby Murray at The Attic in Hamtramck. Usually Murray is Etta James's bandleader and arranger. But when Etta's not on tour or recording, Bobby can be found fronting a pick-up band or sitting in with any one of the town's established bands. This night he'd corralled Tim Brockett on keyboards/bass and Renell Gonsalves on drums from his recording band, and had long time associate Lanny Watkins on vocals. The Attic is the unofficial headquarters of Detroit's bluesmen, and they showed up in numbers to hear Bobby show `em what he can do. Clarence Butler of The Butler Twins, Connie Tate from the Hastings Street Blues Band, and vocalist Tony D'Antonio among many danced until the wee hours. B.J. thought he saw the Detroit Blues Society's Ed Schenk.

And Murray showed `em exactly what he could do. The band ran through some of their recorded repertoire and a few standards (inevitably, "Stormy Monday"), and politely backed D'Antonio and Tate at the mike while Watkins chased some woman at the bar. Murray, whose influences include Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Buddy Guy, all the Kings: B.B., Albert, and Freddie, Albert Collins, and even Stevie Ray Vaughan, indulged in a display of blues guitar pyrotechnics that had the crowd thumping madly and screaming for more. Before we left, B.J. made sure we'd gotten Bobby's new CD, Waiting for Mr. Goodfingers. No such thing as a bad blues night in Detroit.

Bobby Murray, Waiting for Mr. Goodfingers (No Cover Productions)

One of audio's truisms is that a recording simply can't recreate the live musical event--and to at least one set of ears, isn't even close. Nothing bores this point home more cleanly than comparing Bobby Murray's frantic, frenetic performance that Saturday night at The Attic and this CD. Waiting for Mr. Goodfingers is extraordinary, full of Murray originals, band collaborations, Watkins's sweet soul tenor, and a hilarious cover of Albert Collins's "The Conversation." But `tain't Bobby live, sweat flying, his guitar's cascading harmonics slamming off The Attic's grimy walls.

That said, Waiting for Mr. Goodfingers is primo Bobby Murray. His guitar growls, moans, leaps, flies, whoops, and sighs. No matter the role or pace, there is never any doubt that Murray's guitar's vocabulary is as potent and alive as any in the genre. And Goodfingers itself is like a road map of modern blues, with a shuffle ("Strollin'"), an extended, improvised rocker ("Double Clutch"), a mournful ballad with horn section (Watkins's "Where I Went Wrong"), and a vintage, acoustic country blues ("Walkin' With The Blues"). Bassist Lonnie Motley and Brockett stretch out for occasional solos, but the star is Murray's fret work, and rightfully so.

The Butler Twins, The Butler's Boogie (Backporch Blues Project)

Identical twins Clarence and Curtis Butler have been staples of the Detroit blues scene since moving there from Florence, Alabama--just across the Tennessee River from Muscle Shoals--in 1972. Unlike modern electric bluesmen--although their bands and performances are principally electric--the Twins' blues hearken back to the acoustic forms of the Mississippi River delta country and the blues' dark origins in the music of Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Memphis Minnie, and others. The Butler's Boogie, recorded live at The Attic, features Clarence's between-song anecdotes of their Southern upbringing and their mother's discovery that they were playing blues, the devil's music, in juke joints after Sunday services. They survived only because their father, Willie Butler, had a reputation as the best guitarist in Florence, a reputation that both youngsters admired and coveted. Better still, Willie Butler was known as a bluesman.

The ironic title tune opens the CD with a driving single-figure/chord shuffle reminiscent of the kind Muddy Waters brought to Chicago in the late '40s. Clarence generally takes center stage, providing the vocals and playing harp. Curtis plays rhythm guitar, a forgotten skill that anchors the band. The set continues with a litany of southern blues idioms: playing in dirt-floored juke joints ("Goin' Down to the Juke Joint"), adultery ("Who Told You That I've Been Foolin' Around?"), younger women ("Too Old For You"), the magical mojo ("I Believe I Got to Get Me A Black Cat Bone"), and so on. The Butlers' band includes Andy Symanski on piano, John Evans on sax, and Billy Farris on lead guitar. Roger Tapp (bass) and Bernard Dawon (drums) are an outstanding rhythm section. The Butler's Boogie is as dirty, low-down, and raunchy a blues album as you're going to find these days outside of R.L. Burnside and the late Junior Kimbrough. The Butlers may have ended up in Detroit, but their music is pure, deep South.

Willie D. Warren and Mystery Train, Live (No Cover Productions)

Willie D. has been a staple on the Detroit blues scene for over 25 years, playing with everyone from local patriarch Uncle Jesse White to guitar wunderkind Jim McCarty. Willie also emigrated from the South, in his case Stamps, Arkansas. His path to Detroit, like those of most Southern bluesmen, routed through Chicago and Muddy Waters's band, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, and others. Willie D.'s first solo album mates him with McCarty and his band, Mystery Train. This date, recorded at Detroit's Firehouse, includes two Willie D. originals, "Hello, Detroit" and "Baby Like to Boogie," and standards such as "Driftin' and Driftin'," Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby," Willie Dixon's "Hootchie Cootchie Man," and Lieber and Stoller's "Kansas City."

The set displays Willie's vocal range, interpretive honesty, and shows why he was Guitar Slim's teacher. It's also fairly apparent that his guitar style had considerable influence on McCarty: it's often difficult to discern who is playing what lead. Mystery Train (Rick Stel on keyboards/bass and Will Leonard on drums) lays down a solid backbeat. The kicker on Live is that McCarty and his soundman, Mike Boulan, recorded the dates without telling Willie. The result is a relaxed performance, nestled in the comfy zone of a small club. The result is that of all the live albums in this column, Willie D.'s Live is the least self-conscious and, therefore, perhaps the most authentic.

The Hasting Street Blues Band, Down On Hastings Street (Serious Sounds)

Hastings Street, three or four blocks east of Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit, is hallowed ground. From the first influx of Southern black emigres to Detroit's burgeoning auto assembly lines through the end of World War II, Hastings Street was the main artery in a section of Detroit known, for obvious reasons, as "Black Bottom." Before, during, and after Prohibition, legal and illegal ("blind pig") saloons were strewn about the district. At Prohibition's height, some 20,000 blind pigs were estimated to be operating in Black Bottom, in deserted warehouses, apartments, "closed" saloons, and the like. Each played live music, and most often that live music was the folk music that also migrated from the South. Detroit blues legends like Washboard Willie, Big Maceo Merriweather, Floyd Taylor, and John Lee Hooker all played on Hastings Street.

Drummer Bobby White, keyboardist Johnny Roberts, and bassist Christopher Kent front the Hasting Street Blues Band. These three, along with vocalist B. Cubie, also write the bulk of the band's original material. Down On Hastings Street is a modern blues album. It opens with the appropriately gospel-tinged title tune as Cubie belts out the lead ahead of a reverential chorus, "Hastings's all right." The band's repertoire is standard fare: poverty, love-making, alcoholism, and the urge to put it all to music. Their musical forms vary slightly from the dominant 12-bar I-IV-V ("Louie Louie") chords to the "Stormy Weather" I-IV-VI-V variation. What distinguishes this ensemble is its thoroughly original material and its fearless addition of choral embellishments, mostly Cubie and Connie Tate, to its arrangements. If I have a quibble with the CD, Johnny Roberts's vocals occasionally flatten out--something that should be caught and cured during a studio recording session. Otherwise, The Hasting Street Blues Band lays down funky grooves with the best of them.

Robert Noll Blues Mission, Happy Bluesday.

Noll is one of Detroit's rising phalanx of guitar slingers, with an armory of licks, especially his searing, knife-edged slide, that can stand along side the likes of Bobby Murray and Jim McCarty. His songs, while firmly entrenched in the I-IV-V and I-IV-V-IV paradigms, are interesting if only because he's conjured some novel metaphors for the inevitable blues staples: desertion, liquor, and loneliness, "She even poured the salt out of the shaker/She didn't leave me a goll'darn thing" ("I Got the Blues"). His band on this disc: Jim Noel (keyboards), Will Leonard (drums), and Greasy Carlesi (bass) is solid. They easily lock into deep grooves, the best of which are the instrumentals ("Freezer Burn") and the loping shuffles ("Cold Women with Warm Hearts"). This is a fine, self-produced disc. Heck, I'd buy the disc just so I could say I had a recording of Greasy Carlesi. Great name. Nonetheless, I'll quibble with Noel's choice of pulling the "string orchestra" and "space alien" voices out of the Roland and Ensoniq rigs. Call me a trad-rad, but you either use synths sparingly with the blues or you leave `em in the van. On "Mountain Top" they nearly smother some otherwise excellent fretwork. On the whole, Noll is the real thing, and one hopes he hooks up with a record company soon.

Mr. B and The Bird of Paradise Orchestra, Hallelujah Train (Schoolkids Records)

Mr. B is Mark Lincoln Braun, a barrelhouse piano player straight out of the mold boogie-woogie greats Jelly Roll Morton, Lux Lewis, Pinetop Perkins, and Professor Longhair. On this date he's assembled the latest incarnation of the Bird of Paradise Orchestra and has fashioned some of the most intelligent, elegant and downright infectious big band blues/jump jive/swing this side of Ann Arbor. Braun's teachers included Detroit legends Boogie Woogie Red, Little Brother Montgomery, and Blind John Davis. Their collective influences are reflected in B's and BOPO's Hallelujah Train. B.J. picked up one of B's solo offerings at this year's Ann Arbor Jazz and Blues Festival. On that disc, B moves effortlessly from blues to jazz to pop swing: you name the genre, and B has something for it. However, on Hallelujah Train B is restrained, or perhaps not, by playing with a big, very big band.

Train opens with the title cut, another gospel-propelled (and this one has a fully dressed V-8 behind it!) blues in overdrive. The set, recorded at The Ark in Ann Arbor, moves on to band leader Paul Kelly's "Brauny," another straight-ahead blues deftly shadowed with the big band figures that punctuated jump jive during its '40s' heyday. In fact, "Brauny" veers deliberately , toward big band jive on before the band plies virtually pure blues with "One Room Country Shack." "My Sunday Best" is barrelhouse blues at its bass-rolling best, with the balance of the orchestra punctuating it in bold italic with swing, gospel, and Ellingtonian jazz. Okay, Hallelujah Train isn't pure blues, but Mark Braun is an incredible piano player and the Bird of Paradise Orchestra is the best swing/blues/jump jive ensemble I've heard since Cambridge's Either/Orchestra. Hallelujah Train is the kind of regional disc that collectors lust after: great playing, drop-dead tunes, and something to dance to through the night. Find this disc. Buy it. Play it.

Detroit Blues Band, Play It Cool (No Cover)

The Detroit Blues Band has been through enough personnel changes to shame Jefferson Airplane/Starship, The Inkspots, or The Drifters. The current line-up of Emmanuel Garza (guitar), "T-Bone" Wagner (drums), Bill Landless (bass), Michael Marsac (guitar), and Bob Rabaut (harp) is only the latest in a long line of DBB enlistees. The playing on this disc, especially Garza's and Marsac's guitar work, is worthy of their tenure and heritage. However, this is one band that desperately needs a vocalist who can stay on key. Add to this a song selection which, from a blues perspective, is, well, curious: Bo Diddley's "Diddley Daddy" inhabits alien space along with `50s relics "Wheels" and "Don't Let Go." It seems as if the current version of DBB is having difficulty deciding whether to be a bona fide blues band or cover retro-oldies. And while "Wheels" and "Don't Let Go" don't require any serious vocal efforts, the rest of the band's original efforts are marred by the inability of any lead vocalist to sing in the same key as the instruments. This is a problem which prevents at least one reviewer from taking this version of the band seriously. Get a singer. No, really. You'll thank me for this.

The List: Unlike B.J., who knows the local bands inside out, I pored over the "Local Bands" section at Car City Records with an eye toward the novel. Well, this perseverance paid back in spades.

That Jive (Contagious Records). This band's eponymous debut invokes images of the Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Sessions. The songs are inventive with ethereal ambiance, murky lyrics and sparse, spartan arrangements. But guitarist Howard Glazer thinks his acoustic is a Strat or Les Paul, and he punishes it for every so-called nuance that he can conjure. And vocalist Angie Aletha's angst-riddled stylings ring with all the authenticity of, say, a Wayne Newton tribute to the ghost of John Lennon. While That Jive's songs are intriguing and the arrangements fascinating, Glazer's guitar should be fully electric, and Ms. Aletha should drop the Margo Timmins affectation, forget about chewing up the scenery, and find the emotional key that will transform their songs from merely interesting into genuinely memorable. Or just unload the whole shebang to the Junkies, who could use a bunch of good songs.

The Starlight Drifters, Every Note A Pearl (Dyna-Electro Recordings). I picked up The Starlight Drifters because I liked the name of the band and was intrigued by the cover, an amateur drawing of a cowgirl in a fringed halter top. The only relationship between these guys and the blues is the skeletal structure of the basic (12-bar I-IV-V) blues song form: this is a country swing album. But what an album. From the opening note of "Just Steelin'" to the fading coda of "Jitterbug Judy," Every Note A Pearl is just that.

The Imperial Swing Orchestra (Harmony Records). I'm a sucker for swing bands, and guess who got suckered in. Led by pianist Tom Loncaric and statuesque vocalist Tracy Leigh Komarmy, the Orchestra races through a sizzling set of only five tunes, but five frenzied swingers that will have you Lindy-hopping all over the living room.

The Carousel Public Service Corner: Virtually all the CDs B.J. and I picked up in Detroit are courtesy of local labels and are just not going to find their way into your Music MegaMart of Buys. Here are the labels' addresses:

No Cover Productions
P.O. Box 187
Clawson MI 48017-1040
[e-mail]

Backporch Blues Project
2645 Commer
Hamtramck MI 48212
[e-mail]

Serious Sounds
238 Lakecrest Avenue
Baton Rouge LA 70807

Contagious Records
P.O. Box 4355
Dearborn MI 48126

Robert Noll Blues Mission
Precious Artists
14649 Berwick
Livonia MI 48154

Schoolkids Records
523 E. Liberty
Ann Arbor MI 48104
www. schoolkids.com

Harmony Records
2733 Deake St.
Ann Arbor MI 48108

E-mail: [e-mail]. Invest in your local music scene -- you'll be glad you did. -- KE