Artist:     Various Artists

Album:     A Tulsa Tribute to Okie Music

Label:     Horton Records

Release Date:     08.28.20

90

BUY DIGITAL

BUY PHYSICAL

The past has come back to haunt Leon Russell’s celebrated Paradise Studio, once a fertile creative playground for Russell and friends like Bob Seger and Freddie King, that stood silent for a good 40 years or so. If its walls could talk, the conversations would go on for hours.

Located in Grand Lake, Oklahoma, the place now has a future, thanks to Tulsa’s Rick Huskey, who put in 30 years of sweat equity to restore Paradise Studio to its former glory. Its ghosts seemed to enjoy having visitors in February, 2020, when a pilgrimage of Tulsa musicians arrived and made quick work of Back to Paradise, knocking out a loving tribute to the eclectic musical character and history of their hometown in four days.

Choice cuts from Russell, JJ Cale, the Gap Band and Dwight Twilley, among other notable artists, are deliciously reimagined on Back to Paradise, the first album to be tracked at Paradise Studios since 1978. An improvised house band of Grammy nominee John Fullbright, Jesse Aycock, Paddy Ryan, Aaron Behler and Paul Benjaman cooks these dishes well, as the satisfying and diverse compilation boils and simmers when it isn’t leaving its sweaty, greasy spoon kitchen to travel old, dusty roads of long forgotten Americana.

Sweating profusely, they fatten the tight funk grooves of The Gap Band’s R&B blowout “I Yike It,” with its bed of smoky organ, what sounds like an army of golden horns and Charlie Redd and Briana Wright locking in with an increasingly exuberant vocal duet. In grinding out Twilley’s power-pop dynamo “I’m on Fire,” they squeeze out every drop of its gnarly roots-rock charm and stew in its coiled tension, as singer Sarah Frick smolders. Aycock and company pound out Junior Markham’s bluesy “Black Cherry,” wandering like The Doors through a dark, psychedelic wilderness without getting lost in a swirl of harmonica and spacey guitar. That’s after they softly sway through Gypsy Trips’ “Rock n Roll Gypsies” and gently drift across a slightly twangy take on Jesse Ed Davis’ “Tulsa County” on pretty pedal steel brushstrokes.

With Fullbright taking the lead, they shuffle around a delightful cover of Hoyt Axton’s “Jealous Man” that marches through New Orleans’ Third Ward and leisurely float down a slow-moving river gospel with Steve Ripley’s “Crossing Over.” The energy picks up considerably when the baton is handed to Jacob Tovar for the brisk, high-stepping cover of Chris Beasley’s “I’m Gonna Get to Tulsa,” an infectious, truck-driving country route of lively percussion and bright electric guitar and keyboard blips and zips. With its serpentine shapes, their take on Cale’s “I’ll Make Love to You Anytime” is just as catchy with Benjaman at the helm, whereas “Ride Me High” – another Cale original – crawls on its belly through shadowy nightclub jazz and concludes its business with a soaring display of orgiastic musicianship. Paradise isn’t lost on any of them.

—Peter Lindblad