GRANT HAUA: Awa Blues (BLUES): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

"I live on this land, my ancestors passed it on to me. The love of my people is everywhere I see it." This land is New Zealand. Grant Haua sings it in English, and in Maori for a very beautiful song, 'This Is The Place'. A song that only the descendants of millennia-old people are able to write. A song all in simplicity and restraint, just like this beautiful album of the Maori bluesman, "Awa Blues".

Even if Oceania is far from the banks of the Mississippi, the blues is a universal language. Grant Haua knows all the codes and breathes warmth into it with his rocky voice, whose slightest intonation hints at the fact that his life has not been a long one. This life, rocked by his mother's addictions and his complicated love affairs, Grant Haua tells it through subtle and poetic lyrics set to an acoustic country blues music full of sincerity and technical mastery.

Because Grant Haua, in addition to being an excellent songwriter, is also a very good guitarist. His picking technique often flirts with bluegrass ('Can't Let Go', 'Devil Is A Woman', 'Keep On Smiling', 'My Baby') and gives his acoustic blues a warm groove that reminds more than once the glory hours of Keb'Mo' ('Keep On Smiling', 'Tough Love Mumma'). Sprinkled with delicate piano arpeggios, the compositions of the New Zealander are as instinctive as subtle and know how to spare their effects, like the luminous solo of Fred Chapellier on 'This Is The Place'.

Always at the right distance between modesty and emotion, "Awa Blues" is a warm and respectful album of American music to which he owes everything and to which he pays tribute with a comforting sincerity (the country folk ballads 'Might Have Been' and 'Mumma's Boy', the nod to Jimi Hendrix on 'Addiction'). By warming the blues of the origins to the sun of Oceania, Grant Haua succeeds in the feat of transmitting his Maori culture through a universal music. A very beautiful discovery. - Official website

GRANT HAUA

AWA BLUES

DIXIEFROG RECORDS

BLUES