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| Pastemagazine |
 Afro-topped women’s libbers, fedora-clad gangsters and bespectacled academics: The black men and women who inhabit photographer Michael Abramson’s hedonistic photos of ’70s Chicago blues clubs span the social and historical spectrum. In new book Light: On the South Side, we witness a time when the meeting point of Howlin’ Wolf and James Brown still catalyzed black American life—the last time, as Nick Hornby says in the introduction, that “the past and the future [co-existed] so peaceably.”Accompanying the 132-page book of baroque black-and-white photos of clubgoers comes a CD/double-LP of the blues funk these fans were likely dancing to, like Lucille Spann’s “Women’s Lib”—with its nasty backbeat and wah-wah-laden grind about getting equally paid—and Willie Williams’ harmonica-funk highlight “Detroit Blues.” Light is not only the most ambitious reissue to date by crate-digging label The Numero Group, it’s their most accomplished—equally valuable to social historians and plain-ol’ fans of killer music....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| A camera is a window through which a photographer interacts with the world, and it's up to the operator to decide whether his camera will be a barrier or a mirror between he and his subjects. In the 1970s, Michael Abramson chose the latter path when he brought his camera to Pepper's Hideout on Chicago's South Side. Following in the footsteps of his acknowledged influence Gyula Halász, a Hungarian photographer better known as Brassaï who became the pre-eminent chronicler of the Paris nightlife he loved so much, Abramson insinuated himself into the nightlife of Chicago's predominantly black neighborhoods. He was very much a part of the scene he documented on film, drinking, laughing, and dancing with his subjects into small hours and becoming as much a part of the atmosphere as the locals who frequented the same nightspots he did. Numero Group has done a fair amount of work to preserve and document the South Chicago music scene of the 60s and 70s, releasing Eccentric Soul volumes on the Twinight and Bandit labels, reissuing Boscoe's phenomenal self-titled LP, and now giving us this set, which pairs a huge book of Abramson's striking photographs from Pepper's Hideout and its more risque counterpart, Perv's House, with a disc of music that mirrors the photos' sexuality and good humor. Abramson contributes a very short explanatory essay, but his black-and-whites are presented on their own, without captions, which is the best way to present them in this context. The intent of the project isn't journalistic after all. The whole package is built to include you in a party you likely never got to go to....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon: the trifecta of Chicago blues. Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells: also men of stature in the Windy City tradition. Elmore James, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed: the list of blues giants in the Chicago style goes on. When the blues moved out of the country and into the city, plugged in and packed clubs, these were the men that defined the sounds that came out of Chicago. But there’s another chapter in the legacy of the genre, an often-overlooked crop of artists that slathered the original stomp ‘n’ swagger with gobs of funk and soul in the mid-1970s, turning South Side venues like Pepper’s Hideout and the Patio Lounge into havens for club-goers hungry for blues that didn’t so much swing as it slithered. Formed in 2003, the Chicago-based Numero Group has been “dragging brilliant recordings, films and photography out of unwarranted obscurity… we’re on a dirty, labor-intensive mission… and it’s urgent as all hell. Time kills of precious bits of passed-over sound, story and ephemera every day, just as fast as we can haul this sprawling archive of under-heard recordings—along with the musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs who created them—out of exile.” Light on the South Side, the latest addition to the label’s collection of about 60 officially released titles, ranging from power pop to vintage New York disco and rap, soul, gospel, folk, and more, is an enthralling look into the lost South Side nightclubs, patrons, and musicians through a 12"x12” book featuring 132 pages of remarkable black-and-white photos, a few essays, and “Pepper’s Jukebox”, an accompanying compilation soundtrack with 18 of the nastiest blues-funk tunes ever laid down. ...full text |
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