TRANSCENDENTAL MAN

Luther Dickinson interpreted a priceless work of art in music. In the process, the blues guitarist wrote his own next chapter.

- JIM BEAUGEZ

BUT WHILE THE prolific North Mississippi Allstars co-founder, former Black Crowes lead guitarist and side-project extraordinaire remains rooted in the hill country blues of Mississippi’s northernmost counties, his latest project amounts to a curveball even for his own adventurous audience.

The new album, Mississippi Murals (Spaceflight), is a live recording of largely improvised interstellar funk, jazz and blues, inspired by a series of 70-yearold murals created by Walter Inglis Anderson known as The Seven Climates of Ocean Springs. Released in September, Mississippi Murals is credited to Dickinson and a trio of collaborators: keyboardist John Medeski, drummer Johnny Vidacovich and bassist Dominic Davis.

“As soon as I heard the ambience of the room and felt the vibe of the murals, I knew I had to play music in that room and conjure up the sounds the art evokes in my imagination,” Dickinson says of his first encounter with Anderson’s artwork. “The experience sent me on a conceptual journey of composing and drawing diagrams that we now revisit and reinterpret year after year, resonating in the space that inspired the music.”

Anderson, who died in 1965, was an eccentric master of the visual arts, renowned for his watercolors, block prints, pottery designs and murals, as well as his fascination with the natural world. From his home base of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, he rode his bicycle through Texas and Florida and hitchhiked through China, chronicling his adventures in writings recently published as The Bicycle Logs of Walter Anderson.