Six years after his last solo album, Who's Happy ?, and two years after collaborating on the tribute project to Dr John, Night Trippin', as a duo with guitarist Matthis Pascaud, one of the finest voices in jazz and rock is back with his new album, Good Grief. Hugh Coltman, a two-time Victoire de la Musique Jazz winner, returns with a superb rock/blues album of new compositions, accompanied by a band of great musicians. On his sixth album, Hugh Coltman wrestles with his shadows. Grief, fatherhood, a midlife crisis and the vertigo of the times: the rock crooner with the very British accent does not fake it. Dressed in jazz, folk and blues, his devilishly poetic songs go straight to the heart. What if a crisis could be a good thing? “Writing this stuff freed me,” Hugh Coltman reveals. A crisis album, Good Grief? Yes, but far from entirely dark. There is resilience and love in these songs delivered at the turn of forty, the desire to embrace his vulnerabilities as a man and a father, as if Hugh were mourning his former self, the one who thought he was Roger Daltrey from The Who, belting out over blues-rock riffs. “Rather than chasing after a character I’m no longer, he says, the idea was to struggle and accept. Where was that going to take me? Where could I find something positive? All of this helped me put my finger on certain things I wanted to convey in these songs, mainly for myself, but also to help others.” The first thing you hear on Good Grief is Hugh Coltman’s wonderful voice, deep in the pocket, his exquisite vibrato, his sense of drama and, of course, that irresistible accent. One foot in England and the other in America, Hugh admits he looked as much to Nick Drake as to the early Blake Mills. And in the end the inspiration was there, lurking in the pages of a notebook, spat out by the agitated voices of social media behind their screens (“Keyboard Warriors”), vomited by the inhumanity of the world, like that sadly famous photo of Aylan, the Syrian refugee child in the red T-shirt found dead on a beach in Turkey (“Red T-Shirt”). On this world of his and ours, Hugh Coltman casts a thoughtful eye, whether emphatic, cutting or disillusioned, far from the go-getter he once was. In the meantime, he found the answer to the question he was asking himself: why make another record? Well, for all those reasons, and one last one too, perhaps the most important: “Because I enjoy it.”