Album Review : Guitarist Finds the Right Chord : *** 1/2 KID RAMOS, “Kid Ramos,” Evidence

The second solo album by one of Orange County’s finest guitarists plays like an episode of the vintage TV show “This Is Your Life.” But the Anaheim-based David “Kid” Ramos isn’t passively watching people from his past and present walk on the set to tell stories about him; he tells his own delightful story about where he’s been and what he’s learned in 20 years as a blues musician.

Ramos’ professional life has had three phases so far. The first, from 1980 to 1988, was with the James Harman band. All available hands from that explosive lineup lend their talents here (the missing man is guitarist Michael “Hollywood Fats” Mann, who died in 1986). In phase two, Ramos, tired of the touring life, started a family and delivered bottled water for a living; then he got the itch again in the mid-1990s and became active on the local blues scene. Lynwood Slim and Janiva Magness, the singers from Ramos’ 1995 solo debut album, “Two Hands One Heart” return to handle five of the 15 tracks on his new release.

Phase three, still ongoing, is Ramos’ membership in the blues and roots-rock institution the Fabulous Thunderbirds, which has immersed him again in the touring life. Kim Wilson, the T-Birds’ leader, sings on a couple of tracks, and the other members, each a graduate of the diversified blues program taught at James Harman University, are all over the album.

“Kid Ramos,” a tremendously entertaining variety show of an album, should justify a phase 3 1/2, in which Ramos steps up a notch in name recognition and earns W.C. Handy Award nominations and other laurels befitting a first-rank blues talent.

Ramos, 40, is more an orchestrating team player than a dominating force, partly because he doesn’t sing until the concluding track (his vocal debut on an album), and partly because he sensibly has concluded that what the world needs more than another guitar-hero album is an album on which guitar is a democratic head of state rather than a despot. As producer and bandleader, he delegates lots of the prime action to an ace horn section led by Jeff Turmes, and an assortment of talented guest singers and players.

Impressive guitar solos abound, but Ramos makes them complementary parts. He plays what he has to say economically, using a tone that often bristles with the steely energy and conversational quality of a B.B. King. Ramos’ versatility shows on “Leave Me Alone,” a Southern soul number in which his cool, fluid approach brings contrast to a song fired by singer Willie Chambers’ (of the Chambers Brothers) piercing, full-on cries in the role of a man caged in a romance he doesn’t want.

The other big-name singers are Wilson, who contributes typically strong, emotionally honest vocals about love vanished and love pursued, and Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos, whose croaking-growl mannerisms add to the fun in a robust take on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy”--the only song here that’s a blues standard rather than a less-familiar pleasure. There’s no studied reverence in the Ramos-Rosas take on the Willie Dixon composition. It’s pure delight, with rich musicianship playfully arrayed.

The sound grows sparser, but the results are no less fun, when Harman fronts a lineup reuniting him with Ramos (who played on Harman’s fine 1998 album, “Takin’ Chances”), bassist Willie J. Campbell, drummer Stephen Hodges and pianist Gene Taylor. The sound may be down-home, juke-joint blues, but leave it to Harman, who wrote and sings “Walk-Around Telephone Blues,” to apply old methods to new subjects--namely the problems posed by the cellular telephone for jealous husbands who want to check up on their wives by calling to see if they’re home alone.

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Ramos swings with a light touch on a couple of instrumental numbers and on the Big Joe Turner-like “Fiddle De Dee,” with the folksy Lynwood Slim singing the part of a smitten lover who practically bounces with sheer joy.

The album’s emotional centerpiece is a song Ramos wrote himself, “One Woman, One Man.” A lonely woman, played passionately by Janiva Magness, pines for a lover who is far away. Ramos, a family man with a wife and two sons, has lived this scenario, and it comes out in the tense soul-ballad music and in a sharp visual image that sparks the song:

I cry your name in the middle of the night

When darkness swallows slivers of light.

Me all alone in this hotel room,

You, too far away.

Ramos’ vocal debut, “I Would Be a Sinner,” is a merry romp in which whinnying, honking saxophones and an organ join his slide guitar, creating a festive R&B; number that calls to mind those jacks of all roots-music trades, Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet. His drawled, homey vocal tunefully distills the song’s playfully hangdog outlook. Given the promising results on his maiden attempts at singing and lyrical songwriting, maybe Ramos should think about a phase four, in which he does it all.

(Available from Evidence Music Inc., 1100 E. Hector St., Suite 392, Conshohocken, Pa. 19428 or [610] 832-0844.)

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* Kid Ramos plays Sunday at Virgin Megastore, Triangle Square, 1875A Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa. 12:30 p.m. Free. (949) 645-9906.

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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four stars (excellent).