Album: John Hammond

For so many years a bit player in the story of the blues, his progress hampered by an inability, or reluctance, to write his own material, John Hammond has experienced an extraordinary surge in his career over the past five years. It probably started with 1998's Long as I Have You, followed in 2001 by his acclaimed album of Tom Waits songs, Wicked Grin, and now by the splendid Ready for Love, on which he's backed by a red-hot band featuring the keyboardist Augie Meyers and the Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo. "I'm pushing 60, and I'm happening!" Hammond noted last year, after his unprecedented 18-month world tour. Indeed, so creatively pumped is he that Ready for Love even contains his first original composition after 40 years spent as an interpreter of others' material: "Slick Crown Vic", which opens the album, is a lubricious car song in classic John Lee Hooker style, a sleazy king-snake crawl that the late boogiemeister would have been proud to call his own. It by no means overshadows a collection that includes songs by Willie Dixon, Hidalgo, Waits, Jagger and Richard ("Spider and the Fly") and a couple from George Jones, which affirm country music's status as white folk's blues. The tone throughout is similar to that of Dylan's Time out of Mind, a brooding, crepuscular atmosphere with Meyers's organ providing a dark, simmering undercurrent, and the guitars scratching like an itch that can't be satisfied.