BLOOMFIELD ANTHOLOGY

 

 

Have acquired this 2014 compilation just recently and it’s a bottler. Comprising three CDs and a DVD, ‘Michael Bloomfield: From His Head To His Heart To His Hands’ navigates through sixteen years of his recordings and it comes pretty close to ‘definitive’ in terms of both his better known and not-so-known works.

 

Bloomfield was a prodigy on the electric guitar but, just as importantly, he was in the vanguard regarding the revival of the blues in the early sixties and this placed him in an almost unique position within American mainstream music at that time. Certainly, revisionists genuflect at the British altar of the blues revival but Bloomfield was every bit as crucial to its resurgence. 

 

This compilation was put together and produced by Al Kooper so an entire CD is devoted to material related to ‘Supersession’, ‘Live Adventures…..’ and the ‘Fillmore East Lost Concert Tapes’. But Bloomfield’s initial recording audition tapes from 1964, his work on Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ sessions and in the Butterfield Blues Band as well as The Electric Flag are all included together with a lot of his solo stuff up to 1980.

 

Scholars of all things Bloomfield (and I’m not one, unfortunately) may quibble with some of Kooper’s inclusions but he demonstrates a knowledge and a respect for his friend and colleague with this set. My take? Essential listening.

 

 

Review generated for CD Collector Central on 7 January 2016.