Mudbone - Freedom's Coming

Mudbone & Dave Stewart
Freedom’s Coming
Video

Seldom has an album been more accurately titled than Fresh Mud. With it, Mudbone has taken a music as old and as deep as the Mississippi mud itself – the blues – and freshened it with all manner of modern sounds and styles. For example Fresh Mud blends its blues with funk in This Old World and Where The Wind Lives; with hip hop in He Didn’t Make Heaven To be Alone; with folk <and> hip hop in For The Rest Of My Life; and with hard rock in Make The Devil Mad.

Then there’s a track like Evil, a hip hop approach to the kind of rock that once based itself on the blues. Or Boy From Baltimore, a geepie, liquefied love song. Or the towering guitar’n’gospel layers Come Together Now. A trio of tracks that take you to the place Funkadelic would be arriving at if they’d continued on the trajectory that took them from Maggot Brain to Electric Spanking. Which shouldn’t really come as any surprise.

When I first met Muddy back in 1979 he was a key P-Funk player, his sweet tones having soared through every hit from Chocolate City onwards. And even back then he was bringing fresh ideas to an existing entity by first injecting melodies into the mayhem, then moving P-Funk into a whole new arena when he co- founded the Bootsy’s Rubber Band in 1975.

Now, after a decade working with the likes of Bill Laswell, Prince, Herbie Hancock and Bernie Worrell, it’s almost beyond logical that Muddy should hook up with a character as large as Dave Stewart and rediscover The Funk by going back to the blues. In doing so he’s plugged it back into a post-hip hop generation who’ll approach Fresh Mud with the same open ears and minds as their post-<hippy> mums and dads took to albums like Osmium or Funkadelic, more than 25 years ago.