Good Grief

Description

Six years after his last solo album, ‘Who’s Happy?’, and two years after collaborating on the Dr. John tribute project ‘Night Trippin’ as a duo with guitarist Matthis Pascaud, one of the most beautiful voices in jazz and rock is back with his new album “Good Grief.” Hugh Coltman, a two-time winner of the Victoire de la Musique Jazz award, returns with a magnificent rock/blues album of new compositions, accompanied by a band of great musicians. In his sixth album, Hugh Coltman grapples with his shadows. Grief, fatherhood, a midlife crisis, and the vertigo of our times: the rock crooner with the distinctively British accent doesn't shy away. Adorned with jazz, folk, and blues, his devilishly poetic songs touch you deeply. What if there was good in crisis? “Writing these things freed me,” reveals Hugh Coltman. A crisis album, *Good Grief*? Yes, but far from being entirely bleak. There's resilience and love in these songs, delivered at the turn of his forties, a desire to embrace his vulnerabilities as a man and a father, as if Hugh is mourning his former self, the one who saw himself as Roger Daltrey of The Who, belting out blues-rock riffs. “Rather than chasing a persona I no longer am,” he says, “the idea was to fight and accept. Where would it take me? Where could I find positivity? All of this helped me pinpoint certain things I wanted to convey in these songs, primarily for myself, but also to help others.” The first thing you hear in *Good Grief* is Hugh Coltman’s wonderful voice, deeply in the groove, his exquisite vibrato, his sense of drama, and, of course, that irresistible accent. With one foot in England and the other in America, Hugh admits to having delved as much into Nick Drake as into early Blake Mills. And ultimately, inspiration was there, lurking in the pages of a notebook, spewed by agitated internet users behind their screens (“Keyboard Warriors”), vomited by the inhumanity of the world, like that tragically famous photo of Aylan, the Syrian refugee child in a red T-shirt found dead on a Turkish beach (“Red T-Shirt”). Hugh Coltman casts a thoughtful gaze upon this world—his and ours—whether empathetic, acerbic, or disillusioned, certainly far from the impetuous person he once was. In the interim, he found the answer to the question he was asking himself: why make another record? Well, for all these reasons, and one last, perhaps most important one: “Because I enjoy it.”