(MoMojo Records)
“The devil moon is shining
A little brighter when you’re near.”
–Jad Tariq
On September 18, Jad Tariq’s sophomore album Precious Company hits the street. It’s no wonder Bob Dylan hired Tariq to play guitar on Dylan’s 2026 “Long Hot Summer” tour. Tariq started playing the six-string at twelve years old. At eighteen, Tariq moved to Memphis where he became one of the city’s top guitarists of the last decade, with a voice from a pre-autotune era.
Recorded in Memphis, contributing musicians on Precious Company include Earl Lowe (drums), Matthew Wilson (bass), Wylie Bigger (piano) and John Hay (rhythm guitar). Marc Franklin (Solomon Burke, Wu-Tang Clan, Gregg Allman) plays trumpet and Kirk Smothers (Don Bryant, Buddy Guy) blows the sax, creating a wall of brass on these well-crafted original songs. Tariq plays a 1949 Gibson ES-5 through a home-built Fender Deluxe tweed amp and uses no effect pedals.
The track “September Moon” sounds like a New Orleans jazz parade. On “I Want a Mean Woman” Tariq sings, “I want a woman who always frowns/She’s gotta treat these men like they’re nothing but clowns.” Tariq’s deft guitar work shines in “Poor Me”. The title track transports the listener to the old Memphis Palace Theater, where Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith performed. You can almost see the cigarette smoke and smell the heated perfume and sweat mingling in the air…
Swinging like a vintage recording, “Half Measures” should serve as a noir film soundtrack with its portentous beats, emotive horns and sly crooning about dangerous women. The hard-boiled lyrics of “Inflation’s High Blues” resonate in these savage modern times — an echo of eerie days that gave birth to the Blues. “Waitin’ and Wishin'” captures a Memphis mojo that delivers a Friday night dance groove. The album’s final song, “To My Used to Be”, an acoustic waltz, sounds like it was composed by a man haunted by the ghost of an old lover.
Precious Company soothes the listener’s nerves like a double shot of Johnnie Walker Black.
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