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Blues & Roots #2 - September 19, 2004 |
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Reviews
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Tuesday, 01 November 2005 23:05 |
How To Hear The Blues
Reading through the stories, reviews and advertisements in An Honest Tune each time I can't help but think about the missing legions of blues artists and other roots music makers whose presence would positively enhance the offerings to be heard and enjoyed in the jam base atmosphere.
"Alternative" music has several popular connotations: jam music and its offshoots; alternative country; alternative rock; other non-mainstream idioms mostly identified with white people of one stripe or another. But the real alternative to the American musical mainstream and its tributaries is the deep roots music of African America, beginning and ending with the blues.
How to hear the blues in the world of today is a question with several salient dimensions. Perhaps first and foremost is to locate the blues in the physical world. You can't hear it on the radio unless there's a college or community FM station in your town with a weekly blues show on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. You can't see it on television because it isn't on there at all. You can get a blues channel on satellite radio, but that's about it as far as the mass media is concerned. And other than a handful of obscure blues publications like Oxford's own Living Blues, Detroit's Big City Blues magazine or Blues Revue, you won't read much about the blues in the thousands of music and cultural journals to be found in the modern marketplace.
The blues in all its forms, traditional and modern, for 50 years the popular music of African America, has now virtually disappeared from the American musical landscape. The blues is as underground as it gets. Only the tiniest tip of the iceberg, seen only in the august personages of B.B. King, Buddy Guy and very few others, is visible about the ground. The rest of the blues can be found in little ghetto bars throughout the South and the Midwest, in raucous off-campus beer joints in countless college towns, in small theatres and run-down auditoria in our major cities, and at the ubiquitous blues festivals across the country where the blues players first meet the vast majority of their sudiences today.
You can find the blues on record at finer music shops everywhere, and even in limited scope in the major chain stores like Borders, Tower and Virgin. You can find blues recordings on-line pretty much to your heart's content, order them on-line and have them shipped to you at home. And you can scour the used vinyl and CD shops to find incredible bargains on classic and contemporary blues albums. Also, specialty shops like Down Home Music in El Cerrito, California-home of Arhoolie Records-or the Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans maintain substantial stocks of blues sides that are hard to find anywhere else.
Okay, so now you're hearing some blues, but how to hear it? Try hearing the blues as the expressive art music of the African American laboring classes and their unemployed underclass past and present-not the output of elaborately produced pop and rock stars, but emotionally based, experience driven sound and poetry fused together by electrified guitars, propelled by the Fender bass and a full drum kit, and sung and delivered with unrestrained, heart-felt abandon to express thoughts and feelings deeply rooted in the circumstances of daily life and the unrelenting struggle for simple survival.
The heyday of the modern blues and its derivatives-jump blues, R&B, soul music and funk-has been a thing of the past for almost 30 years, but between, say, 1945 band 1965 the blues ruled African America for real. While the pioneers and innovators of the modern blues are mostly dead and gone, the idiom is carried on and advanced into the present century by great contemporary blues artists like Magic Slim & the Teardrops, Walter "Woldman" Washington & the Roadmasters, Little Freddie King, Carey and Lurrie Bell, R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, Harmonica Shah, Johnnie Bassett, Little Sonny, Little Jr. Cannady, Sonny Rhodes, Eddie Kirkland and a host of others too numerous to list here. Original masters like Robert Lockwood, Honeyboy Edwards, Pinetop Perkins, Henry Gray, Tabby Thomas, Eddie Bo and Snooks Eaglin are still among us, and inventive young blues players like Larry McCray, Kenny Neal, Chris Thomas King, Kipori Woods, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Corey Harris are taking the modern blues into their own new directions.
Any of these artists would sound terrific onstage at a jam band festival or opening for your favorite improvisational rock band. Their records, heard in the privacy or your home, workspace or automobile, can bring you countless hours of emotional fulfillment and musical excitement of a whole different sort than you might be accustomed to. Put some blues in your life and see how well it fits the way you may be feeling these days. You might even say that you owe it to yourself to give the blues a careful listen, and I'll bet you'll be glad you did.
-Amsterdam
September 18-19, 2004
(c) 2004, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.3.1.6127Reading through the stories, reviews and advertisements in An Honest Tune each time I can't help but think about the missing legions of blues artists and other roots music makers whose presence would positively enhance the offerings to be heard and enjoyed in the jam base atmosphere. |
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