Sometimes even I forget that music can be more than fast food for the ears. I’d just seen Lee Patterson at King Tuts and the urge came upon me to purchase his album “Razum Frazum”. I had the rest of his recorded output anyway so that course of action was, in itself, inevitable. Being scientific and thorough, I attempted to put it into the context of his other albums and came to the conclusion that Lee Patterson has his own context.
Trawling through his really quite impressive catalogue – it’s good to have research as yet another excuse – and you are left with the feeling that Lee Patterson nails life down and makes it write the lyrics. “Wasting Time”, for example, tells the story of the disenfranchised in society in a remarkably effective and non judgemental way. Mr Patterson seems to have the gift of putting things into song and can make it seem like that they happened to you instead of him (or whoever he happened to be writing about). Even of matters of the female psyche such as “You’ll Dae”, he hits the mark so accurately – I hadn’t even thought about the whys and wherefores of being at that point in your life until I heard that song – that you wonder if he has been watching us all from afar. Even in conventional blues mode, Lee Patterson can turn a standard like “Diddie Wah Diddie” into something that sounds relevant to today which begs the question - is it the man or his music? One and the same if you ask me.
“Razum Frazum” is an album that exudes maturity and sentimentality without ever preaching or becoming maudlin and that is indeed both an accomplishment and proof that sometimes music can be a gourmet meal for the soul.