Artist:     Big Dave McLean

Album:     Pocket Full of Nothin’

Label:     Black Hen

Release Date:     11.8.2019

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Hailing from the prairies of Winnipeg, Big Dave McLean is a highly acclaimed Canadian roots and blues musician, dubbed by some as “Winnipeg’s ‘Howlin’ Wolf.” His gruff, raspy voice resembles artists like Omar Kent Dykes, Watermelon Slim, and Long John Baldry. He’s been around long enough to have opened for his hero, Muddy Waters. He has won countless awards and influenced many Canadian players, apparently getting his start from an impromptu guitar lesson from John Hammond at the 1969 Mariposa Folk Festival. Pocket Full of Nothin’, though, marks a new chapter for McLean, known mostly as a song interpreter. This release, his seventh, and third with Steve Dawson. represents the largest number of original songs he’s ever put on an album, and his first time recording with a horn section.

McLean admits that this is not a straight-ahead blues album. He said, “Music is just music, and when it’s good, you forget about the genre or whatever label you want to put on it, and just appreciate the beauty of what you’re hearing….When I arrived at the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, I just unpacked my guitar, blinked, and looked around the room at everyone. I took a breath and said, “Hi, my name is Dave and this is in the key of ‘E’. That’s when the magic started.”

Dawson’s veteran cast included multi-instrumentalist Dawson, bassist Jeremy Holmes, drummer Gary Craig, keyboardist Chris Gestrin all supporting McLean, who played National steel guitar, electric guitar, harmonica, and cigar box guitar. The group got to work recording live off the floor in just a few days. The three-piece horn section augmenting this lineup included Jerry Cook (baritone sax), Dominic Conway (tenor sax), and Malcolm Aiken (trumpet).

If you prefer to sample rather than hearing McLean’s originals, try his ridiculously impassioned take on Muddy Waters’ “Just To Be With You” or Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider,” to which he brings an ornery, outlaw vibe. The only other cover is J.B. Lenoir’s “Voodoo Music.” Naturally, the guitar combination of McLean and Dawson just couldn’t be much grittier. Listen, for example, to the break on his witty “Manitoba Mud” or the jug band sounding “When I Was Young,” which bears little resemblance to The Animals tune of a similar name.

McLean is on fire from the outset. The stomping opener, “Songs of the Blues” has some fine stinging slide too. There’s pure defiance in “Don’t Be Layin’ That Stuff On Me” and an all-out fish-fry R&B vibe to the horn-drenched, barrelhouse-piano-infused “All Day Party.” McLean blows his blues harp on the slow, smoldering Chicago styled “Backwards Fool.” If this, by his admission, is not a straight ahead blues album, that tune certainly is. Blues doesn’t get any grittier, especially with solos from Aiken’s muted trumpet and Dawson’s acoustic slide.

McLean’s collaborations with Dawson continue to get even stronger from 2015’s Faded But Not Gone to 2016’s Better the Devil You Know to this one, McLean’s career best to date.

—Jim Hynes