The St. Louis Steady Grinders is a duo comprised of Ethan Leinwand’s piano and singer Valerie Kirchhoff. While Ms. Kirchhoff has been performing in the St. Louis jazz/blues scene since 2007, she first started regularly teaming up with the pianist in 2014.
She has a powerful voice and sounds very much like a classic blues singer of the 1920s or a Chicago vocalist of the ’30s. On their self-titled CD, the duo brings back songs sung by the likes of Mary Johnson, Merline Johnson (who was known as “the Yas Yas Girl”), Lucille Bogan, St. Louis Bessie, and Lil Johnson (“Sam The Hot Dog Man”) among others.
None of the songs (other than “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water”) come close to being standards and they range from lowdown blues to goodtime music and a bit of hokum. Although there is a certain sameness to some of the material (it is best to hear just five or six in one setting rather than all 16), the music is enjoyable and sounds quite authentic.
Ethan Leinwand takes solos on each piece and Valerie Kirchhoff shows that, if she had been active in the 1930s, she would have had no trouble finding regular work in clubs. I would love to see this duo perform live someday.
St. Louis Steady Grinders
(Self-Released, 16 selections, TT = 52:44)
www.ethanleinwand.com
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Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings.
Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.
