ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, MARCH 20, 2003
By Steve Newton
Last year American blues-rock guitar ace Jimmy Thackery released a wonderfully overdue tribute to relatively unknown music great Eddie Hinton. Now he tips the hat to a few other six-string stalwarts with Guitar, collecting nine instrumental tracks from his own Blind Pig back catalogue and fleshing them out with three previously unreleased gems.
Highlights include “Jimmy’s ‘Rude Mood’ ”, which sees Thackery pulling off a fleet-fingered, expanded version of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Rude Mood”; and a version of Roy Buchanan’s 1973 masterwork “Roy’s Bluz”, which features more than eight minutes of intense fret-strangling.
Then he pulls off an original titled “Sinner Street” that you would swear sports a cameo appearance from fuzz-guitar hero Davie Allen. Also notable are Thackery’s version of the instro-rock classic “Apache” and the jazzy “Jump for Jerry”, during which he’s joined by esteemed picker Duke Robillard.
All in all, Guitar is one of the best instrumental blues-rock albums I’ve ever come across.