by The instructional DVD — “The Blues Guitar of Hubert Sumlin” — is a mix of genius and boredom. When Hubert is playing: Pure Genius. When “interviewer” Jimmy Vivino is interrupting Hubert: Boredom.
Learning how to play The Blues via DVD can be a tense and tedious experiment, but when Hubert is allowed to speak and play, he is purely delightful:
The quality of the DVD is a little gritty and vocalist David Johansen looks like he just woke up and doesn’t really want to be there, but we can’t let these small slights from the sidebar affect our love and respect for Hubert Sumlin — who found his Blues joy backing up Howlin’ Wolf on guitar 50 years ago — and the 60-minute DVD leaves us wishing for more of Hubert and less of everyone else.
I almost want to watch it for seeing how dull the interview is 🙂 Mr. Sumlin sounds like a great teacher!
Uff. What a pain watching someone like Hubert Sumlin playing with this goofball… 🙁
Can we just get some uninterrupted Sumlin?
The clip in my review is from the DVD. That should give you a taste. The whole thing is dull like that until Hubert starts playing.
Here is Hubert teaching alone in another video:
Yes, there’s people off camera he’s interacting with, but that’s fine because he’s in control and the experience is much different than the DVD.
You can see he’s aged a bit. There’s an 8-year gap between the DVD and the video.
This is neat…thanks David!
Hubert is a lot of fun.