Steve Howell, Dan Sumner & Jason Weinheimer Long Ago

April 23, 2020

Steve Howell, Dan Sumner & Jason Weinheimer

Long Ago

Out Of The Past Music

Texas born Steve Howell lives near Shreveport, La. He has immersed himself in the rural blues of the south and is normally content to re-create obscure country blues with his warm vocals and finger picking. He recorded his debut album “Out of The Past” in 2006. The Academy of Texas Music awarded his third album a “Historical Significance Award” to “honor the efforts of the album to preserve the fidelity of the tunes recorded and recognizes the significance of the emotions embedded in each”.

I picked up on Howell when he released his fifth album, 2015’s “Friends Like Me”; then his band was called “The Mighty Men”. Among the band members was bassist Jason Weinheimer. On 2017’s “A Hundred Years from Today” they recorded as a duo. The full band reunited on “Good as I Been to You” released in 2018. Howell’s last album 2019’s “History Rhymes” featured a quartet including Weinheimer, and guitarist Dan Sumner.

This new album is Howell’s ninth overall and features the guitarist/vocalist in a trio, with both guitarist Sumner and bassist Weinheimer. The song selection includes beloved songs mostly from outside the blues. Featured are “Singin’ The Blues” first recorded in 1920; “Angel Eyes” popularized by both Ella Fitzgerald in 1946, and Frank Sinatra in 1958; “Please Send Me Someone To Love” written and recorded by Percy Mayfield in 1950; Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me” from 1944; Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father” recorded in 1964; Antonio Carlos Jobim’s, Bossa Nova standard “Dindi” from 1967; another Ellington classic from 1937 “Nothin’ But The Blues” sung by some of our greatest vocalists including Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Joe Williams; David Frishberg’s “Z’s” from 1981; “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön (Means That You’re Grand)” written originally in Yiddish by Sholom Secunda, with English lyrics added by Sammy Cahn in 1937, and recorded by the Andrews Sisters in 1957; “I’ll Remember April”, first featured in a 1942 Abbott and Costello movie, was recorded by soul jazz vocalist Johnny Hartman in 1956; and the Johnny Mercer/Jimmy Van Heusen “I Thought About You” also recorded by Hartman in 1959.