If you haven’t seen Colin Dussault’s Blues Project — one of Cleveland’s great musical calling cards — lately, here’s what you’ve been missing: “Dead Skunk” no longer belongs to Loudon Wainwright, who wrote the tune. Dussault has wrapped an Arlo Guthrie-type yarn around the ditty and made it his own. Dussault and new drummer Freddie Perez-Stable have undergone a musical mind-meld, fusing the skinsman’s creative fills and the singer’s hard-hitting harmonica into the heartbeat of a new, jammy, organic blues machine.

This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2007.