Hugh Laurie puts out his first blues album tomorrow.
If you’re American (actually, if you’re anyone with a television who’s not British), you know probably Hugh Laurie as Dr. House, that snarky doctor with the good writers and a screechy female following. If you’re British, you know Hugh Laurie as that guy your parents talk about who seems to be sort of common-law married to Stephen Fry.

"The question of why a soft-handed English schoolboy should be touched by music born of slavery and oppression in another city, on another continent, in another century, is for a thousand others to answer before me: from Korner to Clapton, the Rolling Stones to the Joolsing Hollands. Let’s just say it happens."
As someone who – well, I’m not like a jazz expert, let’s just say As a 21 year old who knows who Jelly Roll Morton is, there were two things that made me want to pay attention to this album. The first was the preface he wrote to the album, at once gushing about the greats and saying that he doesn’t want to see blues “confined to a glass cabinet, under the heading Culture: Only To Be Handled By Elderly Black Men”. The second was his recording of St. Louis Blues, which starts out with a seriously impressive (but not obnoxious) piano intro, and features Hugh Laurie singing in all his British earnestness, and it somehow works. This is not the album of a poser or a bored celebrity. Elvis Costello reportedly said, upon hearing Laurie play, “This guy is a musician before he’s anything else. He’s probably a better musician than an actor.”
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