A blues icon on a jazz label — with jazz sidemen, no less? And it’s John Lee Hooker’s one-chord-playing ass? How would that even work? Spectacularly. It’s Hooker’s voice and his guitar and his songs (mostly — though he absolutely yokes “Money (That’s What I Want),” too), so it’s his show, and the jazzbos fall in line because that’s the sort of force-of-nature power we’re dealing with here. Hooker’s momentum-over-everything musicality and the booming, conversational expressiveness of his Delta-gone-city voice does not let up in the least in this session — he doesn’t soften himself just because he’s on Impulse, and every facet of his expression from good-natured libidinous glee (the heated churn of “Shake It Baby”) to agonized, broken-spirited resentment (the desolate intensity of the title-cut closer) is captured at its best. While blues aficionados might find other, more “authentic” versions of the John Lee Hooker approach on his releases for more genre-appropriate labels like Chess and Vee-Jay, it’s no less thrilling to hear him stroll into Bob Thiele’s turf and bend everyone around him to his charismatic musical will.