Against his time

Bramblett album sounds familiar but not predictable | Arsenio Orteza

No singer-songwriter better epitomizes the phrase "flying below the radar" than the Georgia native Randall Bramblett. His two mid-1970s solo albums, That Other Mile and Light of the Night, received positive reviews but little in the way of airplay or sales. His recordings with Sea Level, an offshoot of the Allman Brothers Band that he joined in 1978, fared only marginally better.

Then in 1998, after 18 years of playing sax and keyboards on albums by Steve Winwood, John Hammond, and the CCM performer Jan Krist, among others, Bramblett returned to solo recording, releasing a series of excellent albums that, perhaps because they can be best described as in their time but not of it, have continued his high-praise-low-sales pattern.