“If there is a sound that says ‘Chicago Blues’ to the world,” Alligator Record’s founder Bruce Iglauer once said, “it’s the sound of a harmonica blown through a hand-held microphone blasting through an amplifier.” Urban, gritty, roaring like the El over Wabash, blues harp is alive and well in the…
Ted Hawkins The Next Hundred Years (DGC) Every so often you hear a performer for the first time and the experience actually changes you. Such epiphanies are usually delivered by someone with an intensely personal vision, one that penetrates directly to your core, cuts you open and crawls inside there…
Rock and roll is supposed to sound like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Rock and roll was born to be wild, loud, angry, aggressive, cocky, horny, irrepressibly youthful. Listen to the frenetic gospel piano vamp at the beginning of “Jenny Take a Ride!” It sets the tone, building the…
It must have been odd for middle-age black men like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson to suddenly find themselves revered by a bunch of scraggly, skinny, long-haired white boys with funny accents. Even the second generation of Chicago bluesmen A Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley A found that…
By Bob Weinberg Jazz and blues. Blues and jazz. These bastard sons of the same mother have become so intertwined they’re often taken for one another. Once was a time, not long ago, record sellers and radio charts made no distinction between the two. New Times puts blues and jazz…
“I had a job but I got laid off,” Buddy belted, answering his vocals with a stinging Strat riff. “I had a heart but it got too soft,” the crowd shouted back, filling in the next line of the John Hiatt tune from Buddy Guy’s breakthrough album, Damn Right I’ve…
It hit him hard, the passing of a good friend. “I’m dead on my feet right now,” says blues guitarist-singer-songwriter Bob Margolin in a weary drawl. Just the other day saxophonist Fats Jackson, best known for his work with Elmore James and Little Walter, had gone on to his final…
Do these things really happen? Johnny Clyde swears it’s true. He was about fifteen, gawking at an electric guitar in the window of a music shop in Houston’s Third Ward district, when a man approached him and asked if he had a band. Turns out the guy owned a local…
“You Better Get It in Your Soul.” Bassman Charlie Mingus’s song title could be considered the watchword of jazz in the Sixties, especially for African-American jazz musicians. Young piano virtuoso Herbie Hancock created the greasy R&B monster jam “Watermelon Man.” Established piano man Horace Silver rolled out brass-fueled fandangos such…
Michel Camilo’s voice is excited. Hoarse, but excited. The world-renowned pianist has just returned to his native Dominican Republic to perform and to pick up one of his government’s highest honors: the Heraldic Order of Christopher Columbus, akin to knighthood. And the media, who weren’t hipped to it until the…
On the other side of the world water swirls counterclockwise down the drain, animals carry their offspring in pouches, and a left-handed slide guitarist plays a right-handed guitar from over top of the neck using his index finger. “The first guitar I was given,” says southpaw strummer Dave Hole in…
As the blues community celebrates the ascension of a new guitar hero in Dave Hole, it also mourns the passing of another. “Albert Collins,” says Hole, “was a major, major performer. There have been some who have been so influential — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Albert King. And…
There probably was no musician more beloved than Louis Armstrong. Pops’s broadly smiling mug, trademark forehead-hanky-swipe, and most of all, inimitable honeyed grits and gravel vocals and higher- than-high-C cornet blasts were known anywhere in the world a phonograph could be cranked or a movie reel unfurled. Satchmo’s legacy is…
Sometimes the years of practice and perseverance, the putting up with crap from club owners and slacker sidemen, all come down to one defining moment: being in the right place at the right time. And baby, when that time comes, you better have the goods. Guitarslinger Sue Foley did. In…
Glee. Pure glee. That’s what shone in the eyes of legendary vibe man Lionel Hampton the other night at Sunrise Musical Theatre. Hamp played when he was supposed to. Hamp played when he wasn’t supposed to (notably, when host Thelonious Monk, Jr., was bullshitting between songs, and later when he…
Kenny Millions is wailing. Rather, his tenor sax is wailing. Legs akimbo, rocking slightly as if on an invisible canoe, the straw-haired, bespectacled saxman blows some furious riffs, weaving in and out of the basslines Dave Wertman pulls from his upright acoustic. Abbey Rader’s hands blur over his drum kit…
You say you want to sign your favorite local band to a lucrative recording contract? Share its music with the rest of the world? Why not do what Bruce Iglauer did 22 years ago and start your own label? It was back in 1971 that Iglauer, a young blues enthusiast…
The showcase that rocketed Piano Bob and the Snowman and the Roach Thompson Blues Band into the Handy Awards history book and the national spotlight is in peril. After two consecutive victories by local acts in the national battle-of-the bands, apathy, mistrust, and irreconcilable differences of opinion are dogging the…
The right hand moves with dazzling speed, jackhammering the keys like a five-pronged backhoe stuck in overdrive. But it’s the left hand, slowly and steadily rolling out rhythms, that holds the key to the loping stride of barrelhouse piano. It’s easy to become mesmerized watching Piano Bob Wilder’s fingers trip…
Sweet guitar chords roll down the Broadwalk with the breeze, beckoning passers-by to the open-air, stone-face tavern. Nautical knickknacks — ships’ wheels, fishing trophies — fill the low-ceilinged, dimly lit interior. And the place is packed, mostly with locals, people who’ve known and loved Nick’s on Hollywood Beach for years…
“Welcome to Club Bravo, home of…the extremely bright light that’s shining in my eyes. That was supposed to be a hint, bro.” Delfeayo (pronounced DEL-fee-yo) Marsalis is doing what he’s supposed to: charming the pants off this somewhat stodgy, tanned and blazered crowd of arts patrons, cable moguls, and assorted…
He’s the self-proclaimed, mail-ordained (or disdained, as he puts it) minister of the First House of Polyester Worship. His powers are so great his followers, when commanded, gleefully pound the drum part to “Wipe-Out” on the walls where he performs, while he knocks honky-tonky hell out of his electric keyboards…
