For those unaware, legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield is captured in concert on January 31st, 1981, at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz, California, in his last recorded performance, just two weeks before his passing at age 37.

The never-before-released show, heard in a soundboard recording, features the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Blues Hall of Fame inductee on piano and guitar, performing 10 blues perennials.

One of the most brilliant and influential players of his generation, Bloomfield was a pivotal member of the groundbreaking Chicago blues group the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and founded the genre-leaping American music band the Electric Flag. He recorded with such greats as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Muddy Waters, among many others.

1. Dark Road Blues
2. Mean Mistreater Mama
3. I Don’t Know
4. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out
5. Kansas City Blues
6. T.B. Blues
7. Country Mechanic
8. Frankie & Johnny
9. Fool For A Cigarette/Feelin’ Good
10. Come On In My Kitchen

Featuring Bloomfield playing both guitar and piano on 10 blues standards and perennials, he opens on what can only be described as one of the prototypes for Howlin Wolf’s Smokestack Lightning here as Dark Road Blues and an emotively impassioned cover of the Leroy Carr’s brilliant Mean Mistreater Mama, the whiskey and barbecuing jam I Don’t Know, before both the fluently engaging Jimmy Cox cut Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out and the soulful rhythms of Kansas City Blues are brought forth.

Underrated and hard to compare/contrast with other guitarists, along next is an incredible rendition of Jimmie Rodgers’ heartbreaking T.B. Blues (given that he would later pass of the disease himself), and then we are gifted the affecting Country Mechanic, a spectacularly on point Frankie & Johnny, the set rounding out on the pairing of the jaunty Fool For A Cigarette and the harmonically rhythmic blues gem Feelin’ Good, coming to a close on a cut truly born of the American blues at its purest form, Robert Johnson’s Come On In My Kitchen.

Official Purchase Link

www.mikebloomfieldamericanmusic.com