Justin Adams And Mauro Durante

★★★★ Still Moving

PONDEROSA. CD/LP

The blues travel from the Mississippi River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Given the long proud history of blues guitar wranglers, how do you make the music of the Delta sound fresh and surprising? One answer, it turns out, is to take it on a trip to Puglia in southern Italy. Guitarist Justin Adams found common cause there with a fiddle and percussion-playing star of the local pizzica folk tradition. (Its wild rhythms were supposedly designed to save a dancer from the bite of a tarantula.) Ancient frame drum and the soaring fiddle of Mauro Durante – who leads the group Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino – mesh mesmerically with the raw, gutsy playing and occasional singing of Adams, Robert Plant’s collaborator in the Sensational Space Shifters. But it’s not all folkie freak-out – on Djinn Pulse or Cupa Cupa they decelerate to conjure hypnotic beauty.