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Album: Boz Scaggs

Dig, Virgin

Andy Gill
Friday 07 September 2001 00:00 BST
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Boz Scaggs is the American equivalent of Robert Palmer, an elegant R&B stylist with consummate blues and soul chops, whose career has been occasionally wrong-footed by the vagaries of musical fashion, despite the abiding excellence of his recordings. Dig, his first album of new material since 1994's sublime Some Change, is a typically top-notch collection, one which reunites Scaggs with David Paich, producer/arranger of his multi-platinum 1976 album Silk Degrees. Paich co-produces here alongside West Coast stylist Danny Kortchmar, the pair devising a wide range of settings from the neo-classicist Eighties soul style of "Desire" and the sultry blues of "Thanks To You", to the fatback funk of "Payday" and "Get On The Natch". All are executed with impeccable taste and timing, with precise attention paid to backing musicians' individual characteristics: "Payday", for instance, features not just Boz and Kortchmar (both first-rate guitarists) themselves, but Ray (Raydio) Parker Jr too, while elsewhere Steve Lukather adds a dazzling stunt-guitar break to "Get On The Natch" and pedal-steel to "Thanks To You". Scaggs' songs deal maturely with love and sin, geography and philosophy, the singer apologising for his wanderlust in "I Just Go" and denouncing Las Vegas in "Vanishing Point". But it's his voice that remains Boz's unique selling point, equally impressive as the baritone blues growl of "Get On The Natch" and the almost casual falsetto of "Call That Love".

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