GA-20 and Charlie Musselwhite | BLUES NOW Review

by Tom Faddis

A bent note can contain decades. A shuffle can summon rooms and players long gone. A single answering phrase from a harmonica can connect one generation of musicians to another. The blues has always carried its history inside its sound, but history becomes burdensome when reverence turns a living tradition into something to be preserved rather than spoken.

On BLUES NOW, GA-20 and Charlie Musselwhite avoid that trap. They do not attempt to rescue the blues from its past or disguise its inheritance with contemporary decoration. They simply play as though the music never left the present.

Released July 31, 2026, on New West Records, BLUES NOW brings Musselwhite together with GA-20’s Matthew Stubbs, Cody Nilsen, and Josh Kiggans, with bassist Marty Ballou appearing selectively across the ten tracks. Stubbs produced the album, whose repertoire reaches through Willie Dixon, Elmore James, Earl Hooker and Junior Wells, Otis Spann, Eddie Taylor, Duke Pearson, Musselwhite himself, and others. The lineage is unmistakable. More interesting is what these particular musicians have to say through it.

“Crazy Love,” Willie Dixon’s composition, establishes the record’s physical character immediately. Blues double-stops cut against a driving beat while a repetitive horn figure digs deeper into the groove. Josh Kiggans keeps sixteenths moving steadily across the ride, breaking their momentum with rolls that make the rhythm feel perpetually on the verge of spilling forward. Marty Ballou supplies the bass, yet the arrangement retains the openness central to GA-20’s stripped-down aesthetic.

The effect is muscular without becoming crowded. The guitar solo is melodic, drawing naturally from rock-blues vocabulary, while Musselwhite’s harmonica reaches more directly toward traditional blues-harp phrasing. His bends and articulations carry weight without demanding attention for their own sake. Cody Nilsen’s vocal sits comfortably between these worlds: emotive rock-blues delivery, blues-inflected articulation, and a melody catchy enough to remain after the instrumental details have faded.

That balance between inheritance and personality becomes clearer on “I’ll Change My Style.” GA-20 works here without a conventional bassist: Stubbs and Nilsen divide the guitar responsibilities while Kiggans carries the rhythmic floor beneath them. Lower guitar figures supply weight as upper-register material leaves air around the vocal and harmonica.

The song’s 1950s rock character is more than period tone. Kiggans keeps the triplet feel buoyant, allowing the music to bounce through the changes. Nilsen’s vocal pickup stretches confidently through the tonic harmony, his easy vibrato and articulation giving the melody an unforced conversational quality. Familiar blues movements remain embedded in the tune itself, including the melodic pull of the IV-to-I cadence. T

Then Musselwhite answers the singer. It is a simple exchange, but one that reveals much about the record. Vocal phrases invite melodic harmonica responses until call-and-response ceases to be something one discusses historically and becomes what it has always been: musicians listening, answering, and leaving room for the next thought.

Musselwhite’s extended solo offers an especially revealing glimpse of that process. There is no sense of a veteran musician arriving to demonstrate his credentials. His authority is heard instead in articulation, bends, tone, melodic economy, and perhaps most importantly, restraint. Decades inside this music seem to have taught him not only which notes can speak, but which spaces should remain empty. He does not sound as though he is quoting the blues. He sounds as though he is thinking through it.

“Stroll Out West,” written by Eddie Taylor, exposes another side of GA-20’s ensemble conception. There is no bassist on the track. Instead, Stubbs plays baritone guitar alongside Nilsen’s guitar, with Kiggans on drums and Musselwhite on harmonica. The baritone fills the floor without closing the room around it.

That openness allows the guitars to retain separate personalities. One strums while another works a tighter, palm-muted figure; their contrasting attacks combine with the shuffle to give the performance its easy locomotion. The Mixolydian flavor reinforces the blues character without announcing itself as theory. Nilsen settles his vocal slightly behind the beat, adding another rhythmic tension, while Musselwhite answers the sung passages with compact harp statements.

Even the production participates in the atmosphere. A quick, plate-like ambience around the vocal suggests an earlier recording aesthetic without reducing the performance to nostalgia. It feels less like musicians attempting to recreate an old photograph than players discovering that the room pictured in it still has a door.

This is an important distinction. GA-20’s identity does not ultimately depend upon the novelty of playing without bass. It comes from interaction, from the way these musicians redistribute weight, pulse, register, and responsibility. Sometimes bass is present. Sometimes baritone guitar reaches downward to provide foundation. Sometimes the guitars and drums simply allow more air between them. What remains constant is the sense that everyone is responding to everyone else.

And then comes “Cristo Redentor.” Duke Pearson’s composition closes the album without a sung word. Musselwhite carries the melody, joined by Stubbs on guitar, Nilsen on lap steel, Kiggans on drums, and Ballou returning on bass. After an album filled with voices sung, played, answered, and echoed, the instrumental finale reveals how little the blues requires literal speech to tell a story.

The movement from minor tonic toward major IV gives the piece its distinctive emotional shading. Against a medium-slow shuffle, Musselwhite lets the melody unfold through gentle vibrato, glissandi, and bends. Nothing is hurried. The phrasing carries emotion without forcing the music toward a climax before it has earned one.

The arrangement gradually widens. The melody rises into the bridge before a descending contour pulls against that ascent. Light organ adds color, while hits from drums and guitars punctuate the form without disturbing its reflective atmosphere. Musselwhite moves from melody toward improvisation, allowing the expressive character of the tune to deepen rather than simply intensify.

Eventually the guitar takes up the conversation. Its shaking double-stops, bends, and glissandi differ mechanically from Musselwhite’s breath-driven phrases, yet the expressive kinship is unmistakable. One musician speaks through reed and breath, another through strings and amplifier. Neither imitates the other, but both are understood. That exchange contains BLUES NOW in miniature.

Across the album, shuffle rhythms, triplet figures, double-stops, bends, blues cadences, and call-and-response remain recognizably rooted in tradition. GA-20 and Musselwhite do not need to hide that inheritance. Instead, they continually change the space around it—redistributing the low end, pushing and relaxing the beat, leaving openings for one another, and passing melodic responsibility among voice, harmonica, and guitar.

Tradition survives by musicians continuing to find something of themselves to say through the roots of the tradition. BLUES NOW does not argue that an old musical tradition can be made contemporary. In the hands of musicians who still know how to listen and answer one another, it offers something considerably more convincing: the blues never stopped being contemporary in the first place.

 

Artist: GA-20 and Musselwhite
Album: BLUES NOW
Label: New West Records

Buy and Stream Links
Release Date: July 31, 2026