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Haven't heard swamp music this good since Tony Joe White."
— Lee Froelich, Playboy Magazine
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According to legend, Thunder Chicken is the moniker for a kind of fortified wine that helped Malcolm
'Papa Mali' Welbourne evolve, from his early years as a crazy music-freak kid
with a six-string slung over his shoulder to the swamp-funk-hoodoo-slide-guitar-choogler he's become.
Along with his smoking band, he concocts
a back-alley brand of Louisiana parade sass that meets bluesy Austin, Texas grit in a gumbo
of the deeply greasy variety; it becomes something joyfully lusty and intoxicating in its own right.
Thunder Chicken is
a beautiful dose of voodoo blues and raucous pumped up Southern funk and roll.
Produced by the Dan Prothero, the true king of raw, Thunder Chicken is one of the few truly wild
and unruly records to come from the rock & roll tradition in the 21st century.
There's a joint-poppin' nasty read of Clifton Chenier's Bon Ton Roulet, and a completely reinvented
predatory version of Buddy Guy's swaggering Man of Many Words, with a killer meat-and-potatoes sax
line by Ramirez and one of the filthiest basslines in recorded music history.
In addition, Mali's cover of the Wild Magnolias' Fire Water takes the chant
at the heart of the original and turns it into some kind of way-past-midnight
hallucinatory processional. The hinge of this set, though, is the nearly
ten-minute read of Dr. John's classic Walk on Gilded Splinters.
The tune is a tranced-out, stoned, lonesome unholy blues with a Fender
Rhodes and Mali's droning electric guitar punctuated ominously by the
whip-crack snare of Smith. His vocal and Griffin's spooky wail in the
background take the listener on a labyrinthine journey into the heart of darkness.
Smith and Welbourne's Keep Happy is a cut-time guttural funk blues with lots of slide-guitar power
chords, whomping snare, and maniacal distortion -- it feels like Buddy Guy fronting the Rolling
Stones on Midnight Rambler.
The rest of the Welbourne originals stick close to the vein,
the vein that is murky and unruly, full of surprises and killer riffs and hooks that could
seduce a virtual street-full of revelers. Cottonfields and Bayous makes a case for this
band being a thoroughly modern construct. The Instagators may deeply honor their musical
heritage, but they're far from stuck in it. This feedback and slow strolling, freak-out
hymn to the backwaters could only have been made in the 21st century with its hypnotic,
twisted basslines that bust like a geyser from the speakers and reverb-drenched guitars
behind the whispering keys and backbeat-driven drums.
This record is timeless, sexy, and dangerous in its roots-man groove."
— allmusic.com
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one of the best New Orleans funk & swamp-rock
records in recent memory"
— Scott Jordan, New Orleans Gambit
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One of the great joys of Bonnaroo is the Thursday night shows. The perfect warmup to a weekend of insanity, over the past few years these shows have been a kind of coming out party for lot of acts to the jamband scene. Most of these acts are fairly unknown when they hit the stage, but by the time the night is over, new stars are born.
In 2004 Thursdayšs set by Papa Mali, a joyful explosion of soulful, funky grooves and bluesy, screaming slide guitar, introduced him to the scene in a big way. Even after sets by bigger names like the Dead, Bonnaroovians were still buzzing about Mališs tasty gumbo of Texas blues and New Orleans funk. Since then, the singer/guitarist has been riding that buzz and working his magic in clubs across the country.
— jambase.com (click here
to read the full feature article)
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Mali and company
navigate the idiosyncrasies of the grooves like natives,
but still conjure a spirit all their own,
as evidenced by the seven originals that round out the program
and slide in comfortably alongside the Louisiana classics"
— Keith Spera,
New Orleans Times-Picayune
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Conjures up a potent gris-gris bag of tribal rhythms and true New
Orleans-style funk,
peppered with judicious touches of slide guitar and more than a bit of bayou joie de vivre.
The vocals are delivered with a soulful swagger, almost as if Jimi Hendrix had been raised
in the swamps on a steady diet of James Brown, the Meters and scratchy Delta blues.
The Instagators cover a lot of familiar territory, but they do so with a greasy authority,
touching on key New Orleans classics with in-the-pocket instinct. A raucous, insinuating debut"
— New Orleans Gambit
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laced with the kind of New Orleans groove that would make Dr. John proud"
— Jay Mazza, The Louisiana Weekly
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a powerful concoction of lowdown Texas swamp blues and New Orleans second line funk"
— Tom Speed, An Honest Tune magazine
Read JAMBASE.COM's
Review of a Papa Mali show at Tipitina's in New Orleans.
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