The cover choices on Have Soul Will Travel's new live CD - including Jimmy McGriff's "The Worm," Lonnie Smith's "Play it Back," and Roy Brooks' "The Free Slave" - point to the band's sonic debt to Blue Note Records' eminently funky late-60s groove albums. Using a front line of guitarist Bert Cotton, trumpeter Eric Lucero and saxophonist Brent Rose, and a rhythm section of drummer Kevin O'Day and bassist Tommy Sciple, that band uses that blueprint and draws up some new designs of its own, and the result is an electrifying set from one of the most criminally underrecognized bands in New Orleans.

With all due respect to the horn section and rhythm sections, which play with quartz timing and a notable sense of adventure in their solos, Cotton's guitar playing is so dazzling that it merits special attention. Using an arsenal of gorgeous tones, perecision comping, and judicious doses of wah-wah pedal, Cotton's deep bag of knowledge and soul-filled technique opens up like the late guitar genius Danny Gatton's work with pedal steel player Buddy Emmons or Hammond B3 keyboardist Joey DeFrancesco. Cotton's also studied the Grant Green songbook, laying down a serpentine web of passages in his original compositions "The Pickle" and "U Say" that drip with feeling.

Other highlights include a stutter-step take on James Brown's "Ain't it Funky Now" that firmly answers the song's rhetorical question, with Lucero and Rose's dual brass lines and O'Day's skittering snare work weaving a deliciously offkilter groove. The whole CD is complemented by great production values, retro artwork, and superb liner notes by James Lien - making this an early favorite for one of 2002's top 10 New Orleans albums.

by music writer: Scott Jordan.