Joanna Connor — Live on 11/11
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Stones: This album’s got ’em.
For as much as the evening’s 10-song setlist may appear packed full of timeworn staples, that illusion does not account in any way for the level of artistic gutsiness and full-throttle musicianship thrown at Chicago anthems like “Shake Your Money Maker” or Willie Dixon-via-Muddy Waters’ “I Just Wanna Make Love To You.” This ballsy hour will blast any misperceived sense of been-there-done-that right off your face.
The pertinent question then becomes: Were you there, in the house, last year? Namely, were you squeezed inside the Fallout Shelter, in Norwood, Massachusetts, when Brooklyn-born, Chicago- stationed blues-rocker Joanna Connor, her frenetic slide guitar, and her intuitive trio took a blowtorch to the concept of “covering” someone else’s material?
If not, no worries. Because Live on 11/11 saves the day by offering quite the vicarious second chance at experiencing inventive personalization. But where will you be going? And, more importantly, how will you be getting there?
Only Joanna knows.
Because, in essence, song titles only serve to broadly estimate a general jumping-off point for the night’s creations. The level of redesign is even beyond how, say, “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’” (Sonny Boy Williamson II vs. New York Dolls) or “Catfish Blues” (Robert Petway vs. Taste) got souped-up. Connor’s versions do not simply rock out blues oldies. They’re worked over, majorly. Deconstructed and then built back under new specifications. Her interpretations are not spitting images of their prototypes. And that is meant in every way as a compliment.
Here, try this: Play “The Sky Is Crying” in your head, the way Elmore James called for in 1960: a tempo made for moping; the band collectively sighing on their instruments; those long, drawn-out glides of the slide down the guitar neck. Now toss that stroll along memory lane aside and prepare for something vastly different. Something contemporary, less rigid, more reactive. Radioactive, in fact, during that final minute. Something unpredicted, in other words. The lyrics about flowing tears remain intact. But the scene going on around them is anything but intact, instead working up from jazzy weightlessness into a blue firestorm. Having apprenticed with Johnny Littlejohn around the mid-1980s, Connor certainly can slide Elmore by the book. Not at all this time, however. Nothing remotely close to broomdusting riffs. His, methodically rolls on down the street; hers, freely drifts by overhead—until the slamming begins.
Or, here’s another: Little Walter quick-trotted “You’re So Fine” up the Billboard R&B charts to claim the second Most Played In Juke Boxes slot on January 2, 1954. (The instrumental “Lights Out” was its ethereal flipside.) Twenty years later, Little Mack Simmons covered the song with a hop in its step. He, like Walter, was also a Chicago-based harpist. Fifty-one years after that, it was Connor’s turn to take a crack. Obviously, no harmonica is in play in her case. The new arrangement slows to an easy lope. Fireworks now come at the hands of Dan Souvigny’s Hammond B3 organ turning cartwheels and flipping somersaults. Then his equally anxious piano rains down cascades of chattering notes. Eventually, that commotion baits out Joanna’s slide to also go bonkers by racing from guttural low tones to scorching sky-high ones.
A pattern quickly emerges.
Because the same goes for “Further On Up The Road” (Bobby “Blue” Bland) and the still frantic “Magic Sam Boogie” (good guess: Magic Sam): Not straight chips off the old blocks. Elmore’s “Shake Your Money Maker” remains bottlenecked but gains hyperactivity—now super-seething at both ends with an exploratory midsection interspliced between. “You're Going With Me,” a sliver of 1981 blue funk pulled from B.B. King’s Grammy-winning There Must Be a Better World Somewhere, turns all the sleeker, drawn along by the respective fire-and-ice blend of Joanna’s slideless tirade and cooled vocals. That said, Shaun Gotti Calloway’s elaborately pulsing bassline is the driver. Each of those tracks are modernized and uniquely captivating.
Not even is Blind Faith’s ‘wasted’ classic “Can’t Find My Way Home” immune from being swept up in the reclamation process. But if you’re familiar with the delicate version Joanna cut in the company of a European chamber orchestra for 2003’s Mercury Blues, this live outing can stay delicate for only so long before busting wide open. The B3 organ sends the signal first by way of swelling and swirling into crescendo. Jason Edwards’ drums respond in kind with prominent presence. Then, shooting overtop flies the guitar, climbing up through barrages into high, screaming notes topped by emphatic bends.
The foursome’s collective potential for commandeering songs comes as no surprise, realized right at the outset. Opening the show is their warmup exercise, “Cissy Strut,” an instrumental funk workout developed in 1969 by the Meters. More than enough meat is there to latch onto, and so is the open space for each member to step into the spotlight when biting off a chunk. Here and elsewhere throughout the evening, it takes a band that is as psyched as they are synched to stop on a dime, redirect, and adjust to meet Joanna’s master plan. Hence, meet her Chicago Wrecking Crew.
“When the Levee Breaks” draws the longest jam: just a wee shy of nine minutes.
The source material traces back the farthest yet—back to the gramophone era. At the very close of the 1920s, Memphis Minnie, her husband Kansas Joe McCoy, and their two acoustic guitars recorded a number of 78-rpm singles for Columbia Records, which included a devastating one about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Connor’s point of reference, however, was something apocalyptic: Led Zeppelin’s rendition. Thoroughly overhauled in 1971, the requiem is droned and doomed to the max with backtracked harmonica, infamously colossal drum crashes and bottlenecked-guitar stabs that leave behind a heavy, metallic taste. (Those stabs belong to one of Joanna’s longstanding idols with whom she once jammed on the stage of Kingston Mines: Jimmy Page.)
Despite the influence, Zeppelin is left in Connor’s rearview mirror. Predictably, “Levee” morphs into its own beast. A steadily raving slide guitar—not even relenting behind Connor’s growling vocals—rushes everyone up to the precipice before the band does a kamikaze dive into a semi-dreamy second-half strictly reserved for instruments to have their say—which equates, basically, to bouts of creative roaring.
That finale, plus the set’s nine prior performances, makes the tenth reason why Live on 11/11 is no stopgap for the band to buy time between studio projects or to fulfill contractual obligations for product. Because Live on 11/11 is a vital demonstration that Connor, whose recording career kicked off with 1990’s Believe It!, is at her most mercurial when caught on a bandstand before a wildly cheering crowd.
The result is every bit like hearing the aforementioned, dramatically reimagined “I Just Wanna Make Love to You,” along with the others, for the very first time. Which, indeed, it is, given the profound departure from their makers’ original blueprints. Muddy, Elmore, and B.B. never delivered the goods like this, making Live on 11/11 a hurricane blast of fresh air.
Label: M.C. Records
Release date: 8/21/26
Artist website: Joanna Connor Guitar.com
Label website: M.C. Records.com
Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski
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