Delta spirit

February 18, 2011 By

Boston Globe, February 18, 2011

One hundred years ago – the exact date was May 8, 1911 – Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Miss. He lived 27 years and left only 29 songs, but his impact on the blues and its progeny, rock ‘n’ roll, is immeasurable. The legend around Johnson – its crux his mythical encounter with the devil at a dusty Delta crossroads – only amplifies his aura.

The paradox is that Johnson is, in other ways, little known, as if the legend overwhelmed the facts of a man’s brief, hard life. Performed by everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to legions of anonymous players in nondescript bars, his songs – “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” “Love in Vain,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” and more – are so tightly bound to the sinew of American culture as to feel like common property.

Johnson himself remains phantomatic, that thin voice and haunting guitar on scratchy original recordings that only got mass-market diffusion with a 1990 complete box set.

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Straight from the Crescent City

March 12, 2010 By

Boston Globe, March 12, 2010

No city in America owns a musical tradition as rich and distinctive as that of New Orleans. The paradox of this state of plenty – with famous destination events like Mardi Gras and Jazzfest and a year-round cornucopia of restaurants and club dates – is that great New Orleans musicians don’t hit the road all that often. They don’t need to.

So it’s a treat to see an all-star trio profoundly steeped in Crescent City tradition – Hammond B-3 organist Joe Krown, drummer Johnny Vidacovich, and singer-guitarist extraordinaire Walter “Wolfman” Washington – take a swing through the Northeast that brings them to Johnny D’s in Somerville tonight.

The three combine for a century at the heart of New Orleans sound – especially Washington, who was born there in 1943 and has been a working musician since his teens and a bandleader since the 1980s. They are supporting a recent release, “Live at the Maple Leaf,” recorded live at the New Orleans club of that name. (It features Russell Batiste on drums; Vidacovich, a bandleader with a cult following in the drummer world, is the regular fill-in.)

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The South comes up North

May 20, 2008 By

WNYC News, May 30, 2008

Up from the Deep South… all the way to Brooklyn. A two-week festival is underway that celebrates the culture of the Mississippi Delta. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reflects on the birthplace of the blues.

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A convergence of cultures in Afrissippi

May 9, 2008 By

Boston Globe, May 9, 2008

Sometimes an artistic project comes along that seems at once utterly unlikely, yet at the same time completely logical. Unlikely because of the strange sequence of events that it took for it to occur; logical because the connections it explores are ones that were present, if submerged, all along, just waiting to be brought back to life.

One such connection is the one that binds the hill-country blues of north-central Mississippi – a deeply entrenched regional American tradition, yet quite obscure relative to the better-known Delta or Chicago blues – with the rhythms, melodies, and performance styles of West Africa.

And the band Afrissippi, formed when a Fulani musician from Senegal named Guelel Kumba made his way fortuitously to Oxford, Miss., and discovered in the out-of-the-way college town an uncannily familiar creative home, has made it its mission to restore and renew those ties.

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No time to quit the blues: Koko Taylor

August 17, 2007 By

Boston Globe, August 17, 2007

Koko Taylor’s new album is called “Old School,” and rarely was a title ever so succinct and so apt. There’s no blues artist active today who so perfectly channels the thrill, the sadness, and the power of classic Chicago blues as Taylor, who left sharecropper Tennessee for the Windy City in 1953 and resides there to this day. With a new album and a busy tour schedule that brings her to Lowell’s Boarding House Park on Thursday, after five decades of raw-soul singing Taylor is going plenty strong.

Queen, doyenne, keeper of the flame are some of the titles that are regularly trotted out to describe the 71-year-old blues belter, and she accepts them all with good grace. “Yes, I do,” she says on the phone from her home. “I’m very honored to be in that position. I’m out here to make people happy with my music.”

“Old School” is just that – a dozen solid tracks, five penned by Taylor, played by three different high-caliber Chicago blues combos and released, like all of Taylor’s work since 1975, on Alligator, the label that has become a one-stop curator of the genre today. This is classic urban blues, mainly fast-paced but with a pair of scorching slow songs, Johnny Thompson’s “Money is the Name of the Game” and Walter Williams’s “Bad Avenue.”

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She sings blues, and then some

November 12, 2006 By

Boston Globe, November 12, 2006

Shemekia Copeland sings the blues. This fact alone sets her apart from virtually all the singers of her generation. And at age 27, with four albums to her name on Alligator Records, the Chicago-based contemporary blues powerhouse label, she’s already amassed a considerable portfolio – and she’s just getting started.

In many ways Copeland, who visits the Regattabar on Thursday, is a blueswoman of the old school. Hers is an unornamented gutbucket sound delivered with force and flair, steeped in the music’s black working-class roots and augmented by the defiant, seen-it-all sass common to many great female blues singers, from Big Mama Thornton on down the line.

Nevertheless, on the phone from her home in Chicago, Copeland, who is as refreshingly forthright in conversation as she is in performance, rejects the label of blues traditionalist.

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Rolling “Thunder”

September 22, 2006 By

Boston Globe, September 22, 2006

Cassandra Wilson has long since cemented her place as one of America’s great singers. Hers is a music of confluence, in which the blues, jazz, and pop provide aesthetic guidance that’s all the more powerful because it’s so free-ranging and loose. On her latest album, “Thunderbird,” the Mississippi-bred, New York-seasoned Wilson turns to material that’s distinctly Western in spirit, evoking Native American symbolism, prairie expanses, and the open road. An inspired collaboration with producer T-Bone Burnett, of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack fame, “Thunderbird” laces Wilson’s famously smoky tone with contemplative slide guitars over relentless grooves: The result is a music that lingers even as it moves ahead, like clouds in an easy wind.

“Thunderbird” came out in April, but Wilson, who lives near New York but spent much of the year in her native Jackson, Miss., is touring behind it only now. Her five-city East Coast stint brings her to the Berklee Performance Center tomorrow, before she heads to Europe. We spoke to her by phone as she prepared to launch the tour.

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They keep the Mississippi sound alive

November 12, 2005 By

Boston Globe, November 12, 2005

When you name your band after the place you call home, you’re making a statement. When the place is Mississippi, you’re also staking out spiritual ground, raising ghosts. Field hands birthing the blues in the ruthless Delta heat. The young Elvis Presley, cutting his teeth in Tupelo. Emmett Till, the Philadelphia Three, and the countless “strange fruit” of the famous song, still hanging from the poplar trees, anonymous and unavenged.

But Mississippi is modern, too. It’s the state with the most black elected officials. Its music is that of Cassandra Wilson. It’s rapper David Banner and his gutter-yet-righteous dual personality. And it’s the North Mississippi Allstars, who raised the flag of Southern rock only to color it thick with gospel and blues, and who bring the festive, organic results to the Paradise tonight.

The Allstars’ Luther and Cody Dickinson and the brothers’ high school buddy Chris Chew grew up in the Hill Country, the high ground east and away from the sweltering Delta. The region, which includes the college town and literary mecca Oxford, has long been good to creative eccentrics. Their mentors included dad/producer Jim Dickinson, bluesman R.L. Burnside, and Otha Turner, the curator of the area’s distinct fife-and-drum sound who was prominently featured in last year’s PBS series on the blues.

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Restless

January 28, 2005 By

Boston Globe, January 28, 2005

To a younger generation of music fans, the rootsy multi- instrumentalist Olu Dara is better known for his progeny than for his output. The father of acclaimed rapper Nas, he has appeared several times on his son’s records, most recently on “Bridging the Gap,” an enthusiastic genre-crossing duet that vaulted up the charts last November.

But an older generation remembers Dara as something else altogether: a stalwart sideman who wielded his trumpet on the avant- garde jazz scene in New York in the late 1970s. Between the two phases, Dara went almost underground, waiting until 1998 to record his first album as a bandleader. In the process, he’s concocted a slow-cooked musical stew that matches his personality willful, whimsical, and encompassing in almost an offhand way all the main strands of the black musical experience.

Dara, who brings his five-member band to the Regattabar for two nights this weekend, exudes charisma and a sly wisdom. A lean man to whom the years have been kind, his look is benevolent and ardent at once. He switches unpredictably from trumpet to cornet to guitar and sings in a husky voice that recalls a countrified Gil Scott-Heron. He is known to stroll into the audience as he plays, demand that people dance, and flirt with the ladies.

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