Growing up with rock and pop in the late 60‘s and early 70‘s I was completely taken be surprise when I first heard the album Blues from Laurel Canyon from John Mayall. The base lines, accords and even most of the rhythms of the tunes on that album were basically the foundations on which all the music that I was listening to were built on. It was really a „wow“ moment and then I started to look at who played with John Mayall and his band, The Bluesbreakers, over the years and discovered that he was the source of the musical education of a whole generation of rock and blues musicians. John McVie, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Peter Green and Mick Taylor were, among others, all at some stage members of his Bluesbreakers band who had a string of Top Ten albums in the UK right up to the early 70‘s.
Mayall moved to the States in 1970 and his music became more earthed and acoustic (with the exception of his Back to the Roots album in 1971) and he began to incorporate other musical genres into his recordings. The Bluesbreakers became a framework in which an astounding number of artists made appearances, among them Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Chris Rea, Steve Miller and many more. It was only in 2008 that the name Bluesbreakers was dropped and Mayall toured from then on as a solo artist and provided a stage for a huge number of up and coming musicians as guest artists playing hundreds of concerts up until 2022.
Another pioneer has hit the dust but the music, especially that marvelous Blues for Laurel Canyon, will always take another spin on my Thorens.