The Best of the Vanguard Years

Performer: Otis Spann
Producer: Sam Charters; Tom Vickers (Compilation)
Distributor: Welk

Notes: Personnel: Otis Spann (vocals, piano, organ); Lucille Spann (vocals); Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson, Barry Melton (guitar); Lonnie Taylor, S.P. Leary (drums). Liner Note Author: Wayne Robins. Recording information: Universal Studios, Chicago, IL. Photographer: David Gahr. Most of the 18 songs on this fine, if slightly lackluster, compilation come near the end of Spann's 15-year run with Muddy Waters, placing them in the mid- to late '60s. There's plenty of talent here and some of the songs are among the best of Spann's solo efforts, but too much of it seems overly polished compared with the raw, stellar session piano work he did with Waters a decade earlier. Still, a decent assessment of the blues great's final years. ~ Michael Gallucci

Dirty Linen (10-11/99, p.75) - "...provides a generous helping of the pianist's ornate barrelhouse style and his throaty, powerful vocals....captures [one] of Chicago's best electric bluesmen in their prime..."

Otis Spann is considered one of blues music's greatest piano players. His career began after he settled in Chicago in the late 1940s; by the '50s he had become an ace session man for the legendary Chess label, appearing on sides by Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, and, most memorably, the great Muddy Waters. Spann would prove a key influence on the British blues boom of the 1960s, and it was through that world that he would garner his highest profile as a solo artist, even cutting an album with the Peter Green-led version of Fleetwood Mac, 1969's THE BIGGEST THING SINCE COLOSSUS. Spann died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 40.

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