RAY JALBERT 529jazz@videotron.ca An old houndoggie comes home to roost “If you want to know who I am”, Ray Jalbert has said, “just listen to my music”.
	For we already know RJ’s story; it reads like a film noire screenplay about the lower middle class family just getting by in an impossibly tough, inner-urban East Side, West Side kind of landscape. The kid grows up streetwise and self-reliant, a quick-fisted scrapper with the right moves who runs afoul of John Law more than once. Sure, he knows right from wrong, but he’s got another talent that makes the girls swoon, the boys jealous, and puts him right on the cutting edge: He’s a guitar-slingin’ bluesman, a latter-day barroom visionary whose music, through his perspective on the stage of seedy nightclubs provides the core moral commentary in the story. WHam! Just as his career is gaining momentum, up the river for a stretch on a trumped-up drug charge. His bands dissolve and reform in his absence; he’s gone but hardly forgotten. Back out on the streets he resolves to make another go of it; within a year he has a vinyl calling card, within 4 years 2 more. RJ leads his band in search of the Grail, toward their musical Mecca: Memphis, Tennesee. Here he makes what he thinks will be his last album at legendary Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, before receding from the limelight back into the urban night. Next scene: our hero’s a working stiff of several years’ deterioration, prone to weekend brawling, boozing and womenizing. On the receiving end of a licking one night, he hears the voice of his longtime buddy and drummer who comes to the rescue in the nick of time and saves his life. They resolve to put the old band together, and with the kind of serendipity reserved for those moments worthy of great Hollywood comeback stories, RJ gets signed to VV Records. And the rest as they say, is history.		THAT LOVE THING Former Spann leader throws down the comeback gauntlet You may recognize the style here as early rock blues revisited, and you’re right. But what makes RJ & the Houndogs’ That Love Thing special is that the band members were there first time ‘round, and can lay claim to that cherished if overused banner of authenticity. Jalbert’s first Spann album was arguably the first blues album recorded in Montreal’s burgeoning blues scene in the 70s. That Love Thing features 9 new Jalbert originals, a take of Slim Harpo’s King Bee and 2 bonus Jalbert slide solos from the old days. Recorded in the unauspicious confines of producer/engineer John Hagopian’s (Nanette Workman, Michel Pagliarro) North Montreal garage studio, That Love Thing is the blues refined and reduced to its Chicago-styled essence, the lyrics expressing the visceral core of themes familiar to blues faithful: love gone bad and good. The Houndogs’s driving intensity could be described as biker-grade; Jalbert’s snarling guitar leads contrast with the melodic slide guitar style of Dean Cottrill over top of the driving rhythm section of Al MacNeil (bass) and ‘Tequila’ Al Paterson (drums). These elements serve as a soundscape for Jalbert’s seasoned voice and simplistic lyric schemes. Groups that bear the usual hallmarks of the blues these days - hot guitar slingers, wailing saxes, throbbing bass and drums and youthful lead vocals - are not so much about blues as they are about show. With the release of That Love Thing, RJ & the Houndogs hope to set atters straight.
					CADILLAC Montréal Jazz & Blues Plus • Read the album notes