Original liner notes for "Scratch It" album by Ken Chang who has written for Allmusic.com and Blues Revue magazine. --- It was just another small footnote in blues history, but allow me a few lines here and I’ll give you the full story. The sky was overcast, the heat sweltering. Guitarist Harry Manx was halfway through his set at the 2004 Chicago Blues Festival when he decided to throw the audience a curveball. Enter stage right: Kelvin “Smokey” Ng. As Smokey took a seat by the microphone, there was some halfhearted applause, along with a couple of groans. Just a day earlier, a Japanese samisen troupe in full kimono garb had played on this same stage, resulting in a muddled attempt at an “East meets West” blues jam. And now here was Manx introducing a Chinese harp player whom he had met in Singapore. I could almost hear the crowd sigh, “Yes, globalization is nice and all, but we would like to hear some blues, please.” True, I could have pointed out to these folks that thanks to globalization, you can indeed buy a Marine Band in Singapore. But I held my tongue; I knew Smokey would give them what they deserved: a rude and bluesy awakening. What followed was a hoodoo-drenched acoustic version of “The Thrill Is Gone,” with Smokey blowing some of the fattest harp licks heard at the festival. He took his first chorus, and passers-by were stopping in their tracks. I had seen Smokey hypnotize an audience countless times, albeit on smaller stages that were literally on the other side of the world. Now the stage was Chicago. Whispers rose from the crowd: “Who is this guy?” Manx was happy to oblige an answer. “That’s Kelvin Ng,” he said. “All the way from...Singapore.” And that, my friends, is how Smokey was introduced to the city of Chicago. * The album you’re holding is one that I’ve been waiting for since 1997, when I first heard Kelvin play harmonica. I had been living in Singapore for about a year, and Kelvin had just finished his army service. Before you could say the words “skunk jive,” I was getting my crash course on how to back up a blues harp player on guitar. I can still remember our first gigs together, and my studied but desperate attempts to “be” Eddie Taylor (to Kelvin’s Jimmy Reed) or Robert Lockwood (to his Sonny Boy Williamson). When I returned to New York in 2000, I came back with an electric guitar, a firm grasp of blues history, and pages of notes for articles that I wanted to write -- thanks mainly to Kelvin. What I still didn’t have, though, was his album. The wait is now over. Prepare yourself for Scratch It, the debut album by Kelvin’s band, Skunk Jive. It’s an ambitious 42 minutes of original music, and the range of styles -- from Chicago blues to swamp boogie to soulful funk -- will surprise even longtime Smokey fans. Back in the ’90s, Kelvin stuck pretty close to the usual Windy City sources: Sonny Boy, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Walter, Jimmy Reed. But he’s tinkered a lot with his sound since then, trying out funkier rhythms and a jazzier approach on harp. Backing him up is crack team of groove mechanics in guitarist Thomas Wong, bassist Louis Lam, and drummer Gopalakrishnan. You can hear the band hit “fully funk-tional” mode on the title track and on the instrumental “Skanky Girl.” The band’s rougher, gutbucket side turns up on a pair of up-tempo blues. In the snarling “Don’t Be So Quick,” Kelvin takes aim at the drunk, disruptive customer who always crawls out from under his rock on the night of a blues gig. On “Tom’s Stomp,” axeman Wong hammers out a stop-time theme (gotta love that grungy chromatic turnaround) before launching into a Texas-style shuffle. “Run, Wally, Run” and “Chill Pill” offer an unexpected twist: the harp player on lead guitar. Kelvin has long been a fan of the capo-styles of guitarists Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Albert Collins, and Jimmie Vaughan. But few of us knew how much he was practicing them. Vaughan’s influence is all over both of these tunes, especially “Chill Pill,” with its tube-melting Fender tone. The closing track, “Letting Go‚” is “one for the harp-heads,” as Kelvin puts it. A tribute to both Little Walter and Big Walter, it takes me right back to the day I first heard Kelvin, and thinking to myself, “Somebody had better record this guy.”
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