It’s all about the flash. If you weren’t looking closely at the cover of Kipori “Baby Wolf” Woods’ latest CD, Big Black Cadillac, you’d think that the No Limit soldiers had just dropped another garish gangsta joint. It’s slick on the inside, too, but accomplished: “Baby Wolf” is so named because of his youth and musical resemblance to Walter “Wolfman” Washington. Like his mentor, Kipori plays a very urban contemporary, funky blues influenced by jazz—he started out in a funk outfit, and was schooled at UNO by another patriarch named Ellis Marsalis—but while the press release touts this as Baby’s coming of age, he’s got a way to go still in mastering who he is. But like a lot of kids, he’s charming, and the real pleasure comes in imagining where he’s gonna wind up. There’s the delicate New Orleans parade funk of “I Had A Dream,” the straight-ahead gravity of dark bloodstained haunts like “The Day I Started Playing The Blues,” and little odd touches like the almost hair-metal turns his guitar takes in the solos of “Don’t Look Don’t Touch.” It all comes together on the album’s best track, “Just Like Crabs In A Bucket”: the homespun wisdom, the smooth sevens and nines washing over everything, the barely restrained guitar leaping free all at once to curse out the rhythm section. It’s a very pronounced step up from his debut, ’98s Blues Man From Down South, and while the reports of his full flowering are somewhat exaggerated, it’s easy to see why everyone’s excited about Kipori. If he’s this good NOW.