A Rare Blend

WHAT: The Hot Spot Movie Soundtrack HOW MUCH: $11-$16 WHERE: Garden-Variety Record Stores

What if? What if? What if?
It’s an interesting question. What if Robert Johnson had access to an electric guitar and a four track machine? What if Janis Joplin had put down the Southern Comfort and entered rehab? What if Jeff Buckley hadn’t gone for that last, dip in the Mississippi? What if, what if, what if?

The interesting thing about this particular soundtrack to a 15-year old film noir movie you probably never saw, is that it answers a profound What If. To be precise: What if the greatest jazz musician of the 20th century teamed on an album with the world’s greatest blues musicians?

Here’s your answer.

The Hot Spot blends Miles Davis’ lonely blue trumpet, with John Lee Hooker’s moans and machine-gun electric guitar, Taj Mahal’s country guitar picking, and Ry Cooder’s peerless slide guitar. It’s a musical Dream Team of sorts and the potential is staggering. Each of these artists is an icon in his own right. How do they blend together?

To be honest, the results are mixed. There are some absolute standout songs here—a few choice tracks that merit you rushing down to your local record store and buying this album straightaway: Bank Robbery, for instance, is the pitch-perfect blend of jazz and blues—a hard driving, blend…equal parts sophisticated bop and raw blasts of juke joint guitar. There are moments of absolute, jaw-dropping beauty, in which each artist displays their trademark style without smothering anyone else’s sound.

Sadly, The Hot Spot is also a missed opportunity of sorts. The key reason is, frequently, too much John Lee Hooker. While I’ve always been a big fan of his style, I have to admit that his guitar and field moans cast a long shadow on some of these tracks.

Some of the tracks are also nearly indistinguishable from one another, so if you’re expecting a wildly varying concept album, you’ll probably come away disappointed. Though this soundtrack contains 13 songs, the Hot Spot is essentially a super long run 6-track EP. Viewed it that way, and you shouldn’t be disappointed.

If your tastes run more to jazz than blues, you might also be underwhelmed—that’s inevitable when you pair three blues guitarist with one jazz trumpeter—even when that trumpet player is Miles Davis.

Still, having admitted all of the above, I’ve happily purchased this album twice (once as a cassette and once as a CD) and haven’t regretted it yet. The Hot Spot is an enjoyable (if relatively uniform) musical footnote—at times, the perfect marriage of blues and jazz. Odds are good that it won’t be on record store shelves forever. That, of course, may be the saddest aspect of this story. You’ll always be able to find a copy of the Spice Girl’s Spice World at Sam Goody’s, but the Hot Spot probably won’t live out the end of this decade. Get it while it’s still hot.