The Avant Garde was a coffeehouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that played host to a variety of rock, blues, and folk performers in the '60s, and Windy City guitar wizard (aka ) rolled in to play a few sets in June 1968. A local kid with an interest in recording named showed up with a reel-to-reel machine and a couple of microphones, and he captured 's show on tape; 45 years later, those tapes have finally been made public on the album , and given the relatively small amount of material that's surfaced on the late blues legend (who succumbed to a heart attack when he was just 32), this set is a very welcome find. has a decidedly different feel than , which preserved radio broadcasts from 1963 and 1964 and a 1969 appearance at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival; while those recordings blazed with intensity, this captures and his band in more laid-back form, playing a small, booze-free venue rather than a rowdy bar or a festival audience in the thousands. may be in a more relaxed temper here, but his guitar work is absolutely on point; 's agile, incisive lead work, his dazzling string bends, and his fiery solos in which he fires off notes with the precision of a machine gun are all on display, confirming 's status as one of the most exciting and underrated players on the Chicago blues scene at the end of the '60s. Here, is backed by on bass and on drums, and if the rhythm section mostly stays out of the way, they give the tunes a rock-solid foundation and leave plenty of room for to strut his stuff. Also, while the material on suffers from rather dodgy recording quality, for an amateur audience tape recorded in 1968, sounds remarkably good, with the instruments sounding clean and rich and 's voice suffering just a touch of distortion from the PA system. never broke through to real stardom, but he made a big impression during his short time in the spotlight, and shows he never dogged it, not even on a coffeehouse gig in Wisconsin, hardly a show where a blues legend would be expected to pull out all the stops. ~ Mark Deming