As reviewers, and volunteer reviewers at that, sometimes we miss things. More than a few times I’ve realized that some music I overlooked was actually pretty good, and I wanted to take a “Mulligan” by reviewing something well after its release. When Mike Zito and Albert Castiglia released their collaboration album, Blood Brothers, early this year, I was half asleep in frog pajamas and completely missed it. But with Blood Brothers: Live in Canada, I get the rare opportunity to review a release that I missed while still relevant. This one is definitely worth checking out.
Kindred spirits, both Zito and Castiglia have longstanding reputations as great blues-rock guitar slingers. Zito, a St. Louis native based in Beaumont, Texas, is a self-taught guitar player whose career, until recent years, was largely a do-it-yourself project. He self-released several albums, including Superman, America’s Most Wanted and Slow It Down, before gaining exposure to a wider audience in 2008 with Today, which was released on the Eclecto Groove Records label. That was followed by the well-received Pearl River and Greyhound, released by Eclecto in 2009 and 2011. his song “Pearl River”, co-written by Cyril Neville, won the Blues Music Award for Song of the Year in 2010. Then in 2011, Zito and Neville joined with Devon Allman to form Royal Southern Brotherhood and released that band’s debut album in 2012. In 2013, Zito left the Brotherhood because he said the one-time side project had grown so big it diverted his attention from the blues-country fusion sound he was trying to develop on his own. Some of his album highlights include Gone to Texas from 2013 and Keep Coming Back from 2015, both recorded with his band The Wheel, and Blues for the Southside in 2021.
Meanwhile, Castiglia’s connection to the great Chicago blues artists that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s is no coincidence. When Castiglia was a regional artist in the Miami area in the late 1990s, legendary blues harp player Junior Wells heard him and immediately hired him to be his lead guitar player. This period playing with Junior Wells must have been a dream entree for the half Cuban, half Italian Castiglia. Wells’ pedigree went back to the 1950s, when he took over for Little Water in Muddy Waters’ band. Few artists have had the opportunity to train under one of that great generation of blues men, who pioneered the Chicago electric style and were the first generation to record extensively on “race music” labels such as Chess Records, Cobra Records and Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in Memphis. With that generation of blues musicians gradually passing away, new generations try to keep their spirit alive. Respect for those who came before is an integral part of the blues tradition, and even those who could be viewed as blues and rock superstars have seized the opportunity to play with those great bluesmen. Yet musicians who worked in the bands and toured with that generation of disappearing blues greats, such as Roy Rogers (John Lee Hooker), Bob Margolin (Muddy Waters), John Primer (Magic Slim) and Castiglia, have a unique perspective and the envy of their peers because of it. Some of Castiglia’s album highlights include Living the Dream from 2012 and Big Dog from 2016.
Together, Zito and Castiglia have cooked up a great concoction with their Blood Brothers Band. Their playing, such as on “Hill Country Jam,” evokes memories of early Allman Brothers with Duane Allman and Dickey Betts riffing off one another (and the connection to Allman and Betts becomes even more obvious when they play a few bars of “Jessica” as they jam on Zito’s “Gone to Texas”). Other highlights include Castiglia’s “A Thousand Heartaches” (which you can listen to below), “Bag Me Tag Me Take Me Away,” and their cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
About the author: Bill Wilcox is a roots music enthusiast recently relocated from the Washington, DC area to Philadelphia, PA and back again.