SOMETIMES the sound of James Blood Ulmer’s slashing guitar is like a man at the crossroads playing a revelatory duet with himself. 

At others, his harmolodic blues are as if Leadbelly were playing In the Pines simultaneously with Ravi Shankar plucking a Mississippi raga. 

In this solo gig the 75-year-old from St Matthew’s, South Carolina, reveals his extraordinarily eclectic jazz and blues range.

Ulmer grew up singing in his family gospel group but moved to New York as a young man to play with organists Larry Young and John Patton, then with Art Blakey and Joe Henderson. 

Crucially, he then joined forces with  his hugest influence Ornette Coleman — the inventor of harmolodics — in 1972 before cutting a string of rampaging albums from Tales of Captain Black (1978) to his critical masterpiece Are You Glad To Be In America? in 1980.

Worried that his audience might not fathom his lyrics, he declares: “Hey a minute, I’m in England. You understand what I’m saying?”

But the powerful message of his riotous notes is crystal clear. He sings BB King and Muddy Waters but when he declares: “It’s a damn shame, people calling each other names,” suddenly he is very much a contemporary blues commentator.

And when he sings the repetitive line: “Devil, who do you think you are?” you see the young white man twisted in the ways of his KKK antecedents gunning down nine people in a Charleston church. 

The blues speak of today through the truth of his implacable guitar.

Review by Chris Searle