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SIMPLE TRUTHS
(Alligator)
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Sherman and Wendell Holmes have been performing since the early ’60s, when they apprenticed as sidemen for a long list of R&B artists that includes the Impressions, John Lee Hooker, Jerry Butler, and Inez and Charlie Fox. After they joined with Popsy Dixon to form the Holmes Brothers in 1979, the group’s path began to weave between the spirituals the Holmeses were raised on and the blues, creating an approach that’s æsthetic kin to that of the Staples Singers. What’s surprising after all these years is how guitarist Wendell, bassist Sherman, and drummer Popsy have maintained their thirst for fresh inspiration, which they find here in songs by Bob Marley, Hank Williams, and Texas tunesmith Townes Van Zandt. Without altering an iota of their church-tempered character, they make Williams’s "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry" crunch with garage-band raunch and turn Marley’s "Concrete Jungle" into a folk-blues spiritual. But it’s their own tunes, like the Chuck Berry–style stomper "Run Myself Out of Town" and the gentle ballad "We Meet, We Part, We Remember," that capture the soul of their art: gentle, soaring three-part harmonies; economical grooves; and virtuosic guitar melodies that work in a roadhouse or in God’s house. (The Holmes Brothers play Scullers Jazz Club, 400 Soldiers Field Road at the Mass Pike, on March 25; call 617-562-4111. They play the Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan Street in Fall River, on March 26; call 508-324-1926. And they play Union Blues, 2 Washington Square in Worcester, on March 27; call 508-767-2587.)
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