When he was 17,
Big Joe Duskin made a promise to his preacher father that he wouldn't play secular music on the piano until after his father had passed from this world, a promise he intended to keep, and did. Reverend Perry Duskin was 79-years-old at the time, and unfortunately for
Big Joe's musical aspirations, the elder Duskin lived until 1963, finally dying at the age of 105, at which time
Big Joe's piano skills had all but vanished. But he made up for lost time, and has been a fixture on the Cincinnati blues scene for some years, playing his boogie woogie piano, a last link to the barrelhouse tradition of the 1930s. Age and diabetes have caught up with
Duskin, though, and his speed at the piano is now gone, but on
Big Joe Jumps Again he compensates by tackling mostly mid-tempo shuffles, and lets his increasingly expressive voice carry the weight. Working with a no-frills rhythm section of Phillip Paul on drums and Ed Conley on bass (both veterans of countless King Records sessions),
Duskin's loose and ragged piano has an endearing shakiness about it, and if the speed is gone, the heart is still there, and everything fits when he starts to sing. There aren't many surprises here (unless you count the presence of guitarist
Peter Frampton on two cuts), as
Duskin tackles several old blues standards, including
Memphis Slim's "Every Day I Have the Blues" and a raggedly affecting version of the traditional blues piece,"Betty and Dupree." It's piano blues, pure and simple, and played by a man who has spent a lifetime loving it, and waited nearly half his life to get a chance to play it. All of that comes through here, but what is most interesting, perhaps, is the sudden churchy feel that comes in near the end of the album, and on the most unlikely of songs, a cover of
Johnny Horton's "North to Alaska." In
Duskin's hands the song takes on a strange spiritual tone, as if Alaska was standing in for Heaven, and it is the emotional centerpiece of
Big Joe Jumps Again. ~ Steve Leggett