There probably isn't a guitarist today who is at once rootsy, complex, and yet undernoticed as James "Blood" Ulmer. He stands at the juxtaposition of so many styles that he cannot be put neatly in a single one of those. His uniquely scrabbling guitar attack, as once described by Village Voice music critic Greg Tate, is "the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery on one hand, between P-Funk and Mississippi Fred McDowell on the other." He's got a gruff singing style to match his axe playing, weary but full of old-school attitude.

When you examine his long and extensive background, you begin to understand how he got to pull together so many disparate varieties of music together. In the sixties he played R&B and funk in juke joints across the Midwest. He played for organ man Big John Patton and legendary drummer Art Blakey. But then he also served under Rashied Ali and Ornette Coleman. He's also played with Ronald Sannon Jackson and David Murray.

His association with Coleman has a huge impact on his approach to music, and to this day you can still find traces of harmolodics in everything he plays. Tales Of Caption Black, Ulmer's first solo LP from 1978, is virtually a Prime Time date, and one of their better ones at that.

After all that, you'd think that this is a lead-up to yet another whack jazz record review. Nope, not this time. Instead, this is about the best blues release of 2007.

Bad Blood In The City is a record I've been admittedly a little late in picking up on. There's been a lot of Katrina-related albums out there in the last couple of years that we've been trumpeting over here. Heck, this space has even covered Katrina-themed blues records before, most recently a pretty nice one by Bryan Lee. I acquired Ulmer's latest not long after its May release, but somehow it slipped through the cracks of the Pico playlist until last month. Maybe subconsciously thought there all that was needed to be sung about Katrina has been done quite well by now.

I should have known better than that; this conversation is not complete without Blood's input.

Like many other musicians affected by tragedy of seeing a great city and many of its residents left festering underwater for days, Ulmer put pencil to paper and immediately penned several songs to express his sadness, anger, and frustration at the calamity. But it wasn't until December, 2006 when he laid down these tracks in a marathon, three-day session.

As explained by second guitarist and producer Vernon Reid (of Living Colour fame), waiting almost two years after the hurricane ravaged New Orleans made more sense because as media and government attention subside over time, this record could serve to keep people from forgetting about the victims.

Backed by Reid and other members of his band from his watershed Memphis Blood, The Sun Sessions blues recordings of 2001 and recorded in the Crescent City itself, the stage was perfectly set for raw, undiluted, and passionate performances. And since Blood is raw, undiluted, and passionate himself, he was clearly in his element for these recordings. And man, it shows.