Dieter Thoma was fifteen when he joined Blues Pumpm, the blues band with which he would travel all over Europe between, 1978 and 1985. It was to be expected that Dieter, meanwhile known as Titatoma (*), would learn the trade quickly under these conditions. The remarkable thing is that with this band he constantly switched from the piano to…the drums, a highly unusual combination. When he quits Blues Pumpm, he throws himself into a career of…piano teaching, but finally, in 2001, that solo career as a blues and boogie woogie piano player comes about. Coming from Heidenreichstein and living in Vienna it’s not surprising that the man with the wild hair is often compared with piano players from the same language zone. With German boogie woogie king Axel Zwingenberger, Berlin based Christian Rannenberg or Joachim Palden from Vienna (but currently residing in the States) Austrian Andy Lee Lang and German Vince Weber are mentioned as reference points, celebrated names at home and abroad. But he makes us most of all think of someone else: Titatoma’s voice has the same soft and creamy character as Norbert Detaeye’s. The light and charming English accent reminds us of the man from the Patershol neighbourhood in Gent. Norbert mostly doesn’t play boogie woogie, but still styles are comparable. Such a person is always one up on us, though the title of the CD is a warning for every reviewer: ‘’Treat Everybody Right’’! We wouldn’t dare do something else, dear Dieter! If a certain uniformity in sound, caused by the style and the voice-plus-piano only situation, isn’t an inconvenience to the listener, then this most recent effort by Titatoma can be digested very well (strangely enough we found another CD from 2005, ‘’Lay Some Flowers On My Grave’’, with almost all the same songs as on this ‘‘Treat…’’, but in a completely altered sequence) His own compositions are playful and rich in melody, there between opener ‘I’m Glad’ and # 18, ‘I Believe In You’. Covers like ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ and ‘As Tears Go By’ can seem cliché, but Titatoma is an outspoken live artist and it could well be that these songs reflect the public demands he’s subject to. His playing is very virtuoso with a good left hand (listen to the masterly ‘Funky Spain’!) His style and approach are sometimes what we could call unorthodox, maybe because he has been influenced by so many different kinds of music outside boogie, but that doesn’t matter: this Titatoma is for real. P.S. ‘I´m Glad’ was # 25 among over 95.000 songs listed in SoundClick-acoustic-charts. (*) he took the nickname during a trip in Jamaica in 1995: a member of a street gang he met there, pronounced ‘Dieter Thoma’ as ‘Titatoma’.