Did you ever hear an album and think, “Gee, if someone made a movie of my life, I’d sure like this to be the soundtrack.” This was the thought which occurred to me as I enjoyed Sidewalk Blues, the latest output by the West End Riverboat Band.
I was walking through the leafy suburbs of Cheltenham as I listened to “Ape Man,” a cheerfully swinging tune penned by Johnny Dodds in 1926. As I stood in line at the Post Office—a mind-numbing, forty-minute ordeal—Lil Hardin Armstrong’s “Perdido Street Blues” seemed to echo my misery (#MiddleClassProblems). And as I got the heck out of there “Keko,” with its ear-catching melody which oscillates between major and minor, seemed to hint at a more productive afternoon ahead.
Sidewalk Blues is hot off the Toronto-based trio’s presses, appearing on Bandcamp the same day I checked it out, May 6. It’s a heartfelt, stripped back session recorded just before last Christmas, “after a few long years when daily life felt unrecognizable,” when clarinetist John Williams, banjo man Ben Lee, and bassist Chris Adriaanse just “sought the simple comfort of playing music together on a Sunday afternoon” (from the liner notes).
They found this at the Royal Canadian Legion Hall, Branch 344, under the curious gaze of its generous members. There, armed with naught but a reel-to-reel tape machine and a vintage microphone, they laid d
