Having tried everything else in his search for a new sound,
Bo moved into a jazz vein on this record, and the results are not bad, but not they're not really
Bo, either. His cover of
Van Morrison's "I've Been Workin'," and his rendition of "Hit Or Miss" aren't half-bad, but they're just classic Bo-- just
Bo fronting some really good jazzmen in New York. For the first time, the
Bo Diddley beat appears nowhere on one of his albums. There is one good blues tune here, however, in "Evelee," the only
Bo original on
Big Bad Bo. It features a powerful performance by the Originator, who working for most of its length with a relatively stripped down band; this one number should've been the model for the whole album. ~ Bruce Eder