Customer Reviews

Paul Butterfield Blues Band / East-West

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a reissue with the first two albums by the Butterfield Blues Band(first & most important line up). Chances are, if one has the first two albums in the old cd format, they have wondered how it would sound if they were sonically remastered.

Fans like me get their wish. The results are STUNNING, as Bloomfield's licks absolutely RING throughout. I always wondered how Bloomfield would sound in this new age of digital remastering (due to albums such as Super Sessiom not being remastered, Fillmore West & My Labors out of print), & the results are unbelievable.

Some questions: were they any outtakes available aside from the Elektra Anthology? There are no bonus tracks present, & I'd dish out $$ to hear them. It's also annoying that it's available only as an import...

However, there are some new pics of the classic line up, & like I mentioned before, the sound improvement is outstanding. Worth every penny of the import price. Recommended, & in many ways, essential.

Butterfield aficionados are spreading the word on this twofer. Sound quality a quantum leap from the old Elektra single albums. Hard to believe East West was recorded almost four decades ago, based on the audio quality found here. Paul's harp no longer piercing, but musical. Bloomfield-Bishop guitars rendered powerfully, soaring above the mix. Here's hoping In My Own Dream gets this treatment. Encore!

There are some bands that sound fresh and compelling when they first appear on the scene, but when you listen to them nearly forty years later, you wonder why you ever liked them. Then there are others, like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, that sound just as good if not better than when you first heard them.
Paul Butterfield's debut album is one of the first I owned at the tender age of eleven. Back then, I mostly just liked a half-dozen songs on side one and rarely listened to the flip side. And when East-West came out, I flippantly dismissed it, thinking at the time it couldn't hold a candle to the first one.
My old album is now worn and scratched, so when I saw the pair being offered together as a remastered set, I could not resist ordering it. When I threw it in the CD player, all I could do was marvel at the miracle wrought by remastering. The percussion, in particular, comes to life. Now here are a couple of albums that truly stand the test of time!
After listening to both CDs several times, I am still of the opinion that the eponymous debut is superior to East-West, but not by that much. I like the entire debut album, the follow-up is only mariginally and perhaps necessarily weaker than its blockbuster predecessor.
In my opinion, the following songs are the highlights of disc one: Born in Chicago, Shake Your Money-Maker, Blues With A Feeling, the instrumental Thank You Mr. Poobah, the driving I Got My Mojo Working featuring drummer Sam Lay on vocals, Screamin', and Look Over Yonders' Wall, a song that seems to presage the southern blues/rock of the Allman Brothers.
Disc two features fewer standouts, but is nevertheless worthwhile. My favorites are: Get Out of My Life Woman (later covered by Iron Butterfly on their debut), I Got A Mind To Give Up Living, and a couple instrumentals, Work Song and East-West.
Getting this set gives the listener the opportunity to hear some great musicians at their peak. In addition to Butterfield, there is the immortal blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield and an early Elvin Bishop who went on to light up the San Francisco scene before falling into commercialism. In addition, there is the drumming of the great Sam Lay and the fabulous keyboard work of the lesser-known Mark Naftalin.
These guys were far advanced for their day and from their collaborations sprang a number of important late 60s musical groupings. If blues is your thing, how can you be without a great pair of albums like these?

Finally, much of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's best music is presented in an enhanced crystal-clear sound format in which I can very clearly hear all of each of the vocals and each and every instrument in the musical mix! This very dramatic improvement in sound quality in comparison to other PBBB releases makes me very, very happy, as I believe that the Paul Butterfield Blues Band is an extremely talented, a truly unique, and a historically very important blues band that quite often plays very engaging and very high quality electric blues music, as it truly and consistently does on this 2 cd set. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band album along with the Bluesbreakers album introduced excellent blues-based music into the caucasian "mainstream" of U. S. culture. Every song on both of the two cds is terrific! Any reviewer who claims that the sound quality of this 2 cd set is not a great deal better than the earlier PBBB cds that include these same songs must have either no familiarity with or absolutely no memory of the very limited sound quality of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's earlier releases. Cd number one (Paul Butterfield Blues Band) is filled with BLUES masterpieces. While the musical character of most of the songs on the second cd (East-West) departs from the more traditional blues musical character of the songs on the first cd (their self-titled debut release), the music on East-West is also very beautiful, very interesting, and very compelling because it is more experimental and more jam-oriented than the blues music on the first cd in this set. The guitar work, harmonica playing, and vocals on both of these cds are outstanding! If you already like The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and/or if you want to learn more about a very important part of blues band history, you MUST BUY this amazing crystal-clear sounding 2 cd set! (Just for your information, a second sound-enhanced PBBB 2 cd set, which includes both The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw and In My Own Dream, is also available. If you are thinking about also ordering this second sound-enhanced 2 cd set, which I did, my advise to you is to simply forget it. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's instrumentation and it's personnel are different on this second enhanced cd set, horns tend to dominate the songs, and the songs just do not include much of what I consider to be high quality blues music. The music is much more experimental and free-flowing, and tends to sometimes drift from one discordant note to another.)

John

PAUL BUTTERFIELD AND FRIENDS SHINE ON THIS ALBUM--I HEARD THE WALKIN' BLUES AND I WAS BROUGHT BACK TO THE 60'S AND HEARING THEM ALL AT THE FILLMORE. WHAT A FLASH! VERY SATISFYING--SHORT OF HEARING THEM LIVE.

Unfortunately, the manufacturers of this album set decided to use a form of copy protection that will not allow you to play the cd in an xbox, on your pc or any device that may or may not allow ripping. So far, I've only had success playing the album AT ALL in my car stereo and a regular compact disc player. I wonder if it would work in a car with a stereo that has a hard drive? I'm guessing no. This should be explained to customers. Why can't I listed to my album on my computer or my home stereo through my xbox? Ridiculous. I can't put it on my mp3 player either, so basically I'm stuck with car stereo or lugging around an original portable "compact"
disc player. Sorry, but not worth the remastering as the other review recommends.

I purchased this CD and although the sound is great I find no enhancement on it. I wrote the company and we bickered back and forth, I see the original one that was up they touted as Rhino-WEA and when I questioned the Elektra they stated the E in WEA stood for Elektra, so it came as a German import not a UK import as stated in the description. Lastly, I found no data on the CD which would make it an "ENHANCED" CD and they never responded when I ask them for their definition of the word... Is it worth the cost? Guessing that would be up to you

This was a disappointment. It is really unfortunate that for this price no effort was put into re-mixing or re-mastering these two iconic albums. After years of listening to the original vinyl in college on my old Acoustic Research stereo system these modern digital discs played on equipment superior to my old AR gear were an unpleasant surprise. The sound is flat, muddy and thin. The music and the energy still stand out. These classics deserved better treatment.

You're not getting anything not on the original CD releases, so there is really no good reason to pay thirty bucks for this two-in-one package. If you don't have any of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's first two albums, you can get this one a lot cheaper at Amazon.co.uk :-)

But both albums are excellent. Paul Butterfield's 1965 debut album, recorded with Howlin' Wolf's former drummer Sam Lay and guitarists Mike Bloomfield (slide and no slide) and Elvin Bishop (no slide), is a thoroughly authentic blues album, one that avoids the pitfalls that many aspiring white blues combos didn't.

It is really hard, in fact, to overestimate the importance of Paul Butterfield's efforts. Before him, white musicians in Britain and the US alike treated the blues with cautious respect, afraid of coming off as inauthentic (and with very good reason). But Paul Butterfield cleared the way for white musicians to build upon the blues tradition (instead of merely replicating it), and on the first of these two album he and the star-studded band power through a number of tight, muscular blues covers which include Elmore James' "Look On Yonder Wall", Little Walter's "Last Night" and "Blues With A Feeling", Little Junior Parker's "Mystery Train", and Muddy Waters' "I Got My Mojo Working" (which features a great, raw lead vocal from drummer Sam Lay).

Bloomfield's and Butterfield's playing is sublime, and there are a few of fine original songs here as well, the soulful, Elmore James-like "Our Love Is Drifting" and Chicago guitarist Nick Gravenite's excellent "Born In Chicago" in particular.

"East-West", the band's second album from 1966, relied more on originals and was more experimental, paving the way for the elaborate blues-rock style of the Allman Brothers and Cream.
It opens with a fine take on "Walkin' Blues" (which is credited to Robert Johnson, who in fact learned it from Son House), and other highlights include "All These Blues", Allen Toussaint's funky "Get Out Of My Life, Woman", and the driving (no pun intended) "Two Trains Running".

Guitarist Elvin Bishop, slide slinger Mike Bloomfield, and pianist/organ player Mark Naftalin are superb...Naftalin's piano solo on "Get Out Of My Life, Woman" completely takes over the track, and Mike Bloomfield lays down some smouldering lead guitar lines on the slow burner "I've Got A Mind To Give Up Living".

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band didn't knock Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf off the blues throne, but their brand of blues were much more muscular and more authentic sounding than almost all of their contemporaries, and a little more palatable for inexperiences blues listeners than the real deal.
Not a substitute for Muddy or Elmore or the Wolf, but a fine supplement. Two albums of great material, played with energy and conviction.

And doing a helluva job while they're at it. Very authentic-sounding approach by Paul Butterfield, et al. Ironically, the best of the bunch is "Born in Chicago," penned not by a blues great, but by Butterfield's college crony Nick Gravenities.