This is the return of a very good old friend as Hep Cat has reissued one of the earliest albums from the catalog of New Orleans’ Black Top label. Earl King and Roomful of Blues fit like a hand inside a glove and this is the proof. The New England-based band frequently played Tipitina’s in the early 1980s, and producer Hammond Scott and myself would pick Earl up at the Tastee Donuts shop on Louisiana Avenue and usher him over to 501 Napoleon on those evenings. Anyone who saw and heard Earl jam with Roomful there will tell you that it was some of the most memorable music they ever heard. Getting Earl together with the band in the studio was no-brainer. He had a book full of great new material for the1986 session and it’s displayed here.

The set opens with the magnificent “It All Went Down the Drain,” a song that describes a doomed love affair in a way only Earl King could. In fact love—the lack of it, the procurement of it, the retention of it, and the management of it—is a common theme here, as songs like “Love Rent,” “Iron Cupid” and “Three Can Play the Game” demonstrate. King covers himself a couple times—”I Met a Stranger” and “Lonely, Lonely Nights”— and there’s even a “new” Carnival song, “Mardi Gras in the City” (King pronounced it “Mardi Graws”).

With fve horns, Roomful of Blues provided a big, punchy sound, and they covered the quirky rhythms King demanded to a tee. In fact, there’s only one straight blues and that’s the instrumental “Somebody’s Got a Tail.” Needless to say, the success of Glazed got King out of the donut shop a lot more as he toured Japan and Europe after its release. Even though Black Top issued two more King albums, he wouldn’t surpass these recordings. This is one of the 10 best New Orleans R&B albums recorded in the last 30 years. If you missed this the frst time around or you want a reminder of how talented Earl King was, you should be all over this one.