Solomon Burke - Make Do with What You've Got

Genre r & b Publisher Shout Factory External Links Official Site Shout Factory

Make Do with What You've Got is an appropriate title for this record. Solomon Burke's voice isn't entirely shot, but it's a dim echo of what it was during his 1960s heyday. Producer Don Was has hooked him up with songs by Dylan, J.R. Robertson, Van Morrison, Hank Williams and Mac Rebennack. Ray Parker Jr. plays lead guitar, and Reggie Young rhythm guitar. This is another depressing example of the misguided attempt to update a classic soul singer's sound.

I mean, Burke sings better than you or I, maybe, but his range is pretty much nonexistent, his phrasing isn't particularly acute, and the arrangements themselves don't signify much. Howard Tate, a singer who never achieved Burke's level of popularity, ran into somewhat similar problems on his recent Rediscovered album, on which songs by Prince and Elvis Costello didn't compensate for Jerry Ragovoy's dated production techniques (Ragovoy, for some obscure reason, chose to lard the album with annoying keyboard-bass sounds). However, Tate can still sing about as well as he did back in 1967. And it's a matter of hipster cred, too, as Burke's last album, which wasn't much, was lauded far more in the press than was Tate's far superior effort. The indie mindset simply can't get the fact that all soul music isn't created equal (the ridiculous praise heaped upon the reissue of Shuggie Otis's '70s material is another good example of this curious myopia).

Anyway, he does Robertson's "It Makes No Difference," a pretty good song from The Band's Northern Lights, Southern Cross (not a great song; the line about stampeding cattle sounds just as silly coming out of Burke's mouth as it did on the original). Burke can't hit the notes; his timbre is pinched and dry. He does all right with his own "After All These Years," a nice slow one in 6/8, and it's fun to hear him try Jagger and Richards's "I Got the Blues." A good example of the way he coasts on mannerism, overdoes the whole thing to the point where it becomes a caricature--no patch on the original. So congratulate yourselves, if you must, that you're experiencing real soul music here, or whatever. You'd be better off, soul men and women, picking up a copy of Burke's great King Solomon, or the recent Howard Tate reissue on Hip-O.