Hugh Laurie delivers an album of bawdy and browbeaten New Orleans piano standards with a voice of sand and glue and chops to make Clint Eastwood weep, all produced by Joe Henry. Unlikely? Only as unlikely as this self-confessed middle-class Englishman remaking himself as a gruff, misanthropic, unshaven Doctor Feelbad on Stateside TV. Hugh Laurie has grown into his face; now he’s got the voice to match, a grizzled, careworn, man's man's voice.
He knows his stuff too. In the erudite and sardonic sleevenotes, he outlines a lifelong obsession with Louisiana piano blues, jazz and spirituals, dirges, rags and rave-ups. Let Them Talk's financial backers might have one eye on the Buena Vista/O Brother/Seeger Sessions demographic, but this is a record made with love and care. The playing and production is gold standard and the set list exquisite (Louis Armstrong, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton, Sister Rosetta Tharp, Blind Blake, Professor Longhair). Laurie understands all the wry asides, Biblical profundities and clapperboard shack tragedies of songs like 'St. James Infirmary', 'Battle Of Jericho' and 'The Whale Has Swallowed Me', and his band are the SAS crack team of roots specialists, with big shiny medals of distinction due the rhythm section, David Piltch and and Jay Bellerose. It swings, big time. This writer, for one, never expected to be so transfixed by the sound of Mr. Laurie singing Robert Johnson.
There are a few notable cameos (Allen Toussaint provides the horn charts, and Irma Thomas and Dr. John step in out of the rain for a tune or two), and at least one misstep (Tom Jones still sounds like a fake rodeo bull in a china shop), but mostly it’s the star that steals the show.