Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

Listen and be heard. These four words are an excellent definition of a musician. They are also useful in describing the essential duties of someone writing about music, whether writing about a well-known musician, someone virtually unknown, and everyone who falls somewhere in between those two categories.

Take Vallejo?s Saturday morning Farmers? Market on Georgia Street, for example. Along with the booths selling fruits, vegetables, breads, flowers, and other items are areas where musicians perform and sell their CDs. One of them is a dreadlocked man who sings pop and R&B standards and plays his electric piano. He keeps a few copies of a CD next to his tip jar. I bought one of them, titled Blues Reflections by Rob Robinson & The Fabulous Diamonds.

Blues Reeflections is a collection of eleven R&B songs that are both easy on the ears and gritty at the same time. It is the kind of music that comes from a lifetime of practice and the ability of the players to listen to the other musicians during each song. In an age where recording music is more and more a matter of playing until a useable, or salvageable, track is captured digitally or on tape, this music is, as the CD notes, ?usually one take with no dubbing, we bad!?

The musicians are Robinson on vocals and the above-mentioned electric piano, Skip Black on electric guitar, and Brian Fischer on drums and sound. I assume ?sound? means ?engineering.? Not much information is listed on the CD and there was no jacket in the plastic case. The bass player was not credited; I assumed from listening that Robinson programmed his keyboard to split the keys into a ?bass? sound for the left hand and ?electric piano? for his right hand. The piano sound on most songs is usually whole notes (that?s four beats per note, for those of you who didn?t take music lessons as a youngster) played as chords, which is similar to strumming a guitar once every four beats. This technique tends to give the piano a nice space and works well with the drum and guitar parts. All four instruments and the vocals are clearly heard.

The songs on the CD have no information regarding writing credit. Two of the songs are easily recognizable: Charles Brown?s ?Drifting Blues? (?I?m drifting/Like a ship out over the sea?), and ?Rock Me Baby,? the B.B. King classic of the blues. The remaining nine songs are comparable to the level of those two songs. All eleven selections are enhanced by the live sound of the band. This CD has the feel of a gig where the players were digging deep into each song. The engineer?s use of reverb on the vocals gives Robinson?s voice a big ?Phil Spector Wall Of Sound? feel.

R&B recordings can fall into a pattern of sameness from song to song. This CD is spared that fate by little things like Black?s muted guitar strings run before his solo in ?Drifting Blues,? the fade-in of the band already playing as an intro for ?Stepping Stone,? the surf band-mixed-with Sonny Boy Williamson feel of ?Sitting At Home,? intros that range from five seconds on ?Found Love? to fifty-two seconds on ?Someday? and ?Drifting Blues,? some uncredited harmonica playing (Robinson?) in the last three songs, and the dead-on timekeeping from Fischer?s drumming.

I picked up this CD in 2004 and it has been a favorite of mine since then. So many recordings fall through the cracks, this one deserves to be heard. Remember while shopping at future Farmers? Markets that man cannot live by bread alone, and pick up a copy of this CD.