No one’s played blues harmonica more delicately, more lyrically.
“Shakey,” “Mumbles”—no one’s had weirder nicknames.
No one else in my years at Alligator Records (back in the 1970s), where I worked with a lot of musicians who drank more in a day than most folks do in a month, managed to do this: trip over the drum set, right in the middle of a performance (at Notre Dame), and fall over onstage.
Big Walter Horton, live, Copenhagen, 1970
Chicago, Texas, Louisiana, West Coast—blues comes in lots of different shades.
Freddie King, with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown; live (TV broadcast [The !!!! Beat]), 1966
Part 1
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Part 2 (“Funnybone”)
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Part 3 (“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”)
replay: a clip too good for just one day
Here’s another musician who, like Dinu Lipatti (Tuesday’s post), died way too young: the great Chicago blues artist Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett). He suffered a fatal heart attack just months after this performance. He was 32.
Magic Sam, live (TV broadcast), Germany, 1969
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lagniappe
Facebook seems to have expanded into new markets. “Sign up,” they say, “to connect with [t]he late, great Magic Sam.”
(Originally posted 11/21/09.)
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Want more Chicago blues?
looking back
Today, celebrating our 200th post, we revisit a few favorites.
If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
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How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.
Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959
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lagniappe
He breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies [1996])
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The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip.”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songer-writer, cellist, and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications) and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell
“Get Around To It”
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“You And Me Both”
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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”
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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)
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Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).
Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.
Vernard Johnson, saxophone
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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lagniappe
reading table
Music . . . helped me to go deeper inside myself, to find new things there: the variety which I had vainly sought in life and in travel, yet the longing for which was stirred in me by the surge of sound whose sunlit wavelets came to break at my feet.
—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (Trans. Carol Clark)
Both Chicago blues artists. Both guitar players. Both influenced by other kinds of music.
Musical personalities? They could hardly be more different.
Buddy Guy, “Let Me Love You Baby,” live
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Fenton Robinson, “Somebody Loan Me A Dime,” live, 1977
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Back in the 1970s, when I was at Alligator Records, I had the pleasure of working with Fenton, co-producing his album I Hear Some Blues Downstairs (a Grammy nominee). He didn’t fit the stereotype of a bluesman. Gentle, soft-spoken, serious, introspective: he was all these things. He died in 1997.
Bessie Smith, Clifford Brown, Scott LaFaro, Duane Allman: the road where musicians lose their lives goes on, and on, and on.
Lil’ Dave Thompson, May 21, 1969-February 14, 2010 (killed in a car accident Sunday morning en route home to Greenville, Mississippi, after a Saturday night performance in Charleston, South Carolina)
“I Got The Blues,” live, Kentucky (Bowling Green), 2008
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“Lil’ Girl,” live, Pennsylvania (Blakeslee), 2008
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“Call Me, Baby,” live, South Carolina (Charleston), 2009
Chicago Blues Festival, part 4
Here, to wrap up this festival, is one of the best performances by Otis Rush I’ve ever heard (which makes it one of the best blues performances I’ve ever heard [which makes it, etc.]).
Otis Rush (with Fred Below, drums), “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” live, Germany, 1966
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lagniappe
I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.—Otis Rush
Chicago Blues Festival, part 3
Junior Wells
“Ships On The Ocean” (with Buddy Guy, guitar), live, Chicago (Theresa’s Lounge, 48th & Indiana), mid-1970s
*****
“Hoodoo Man Blues” (with Otis Rush, guitar; Fred Below, drums), live, Germany, 1966
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lagniappe
After Buddy [Guy] and Junior [Wells] did their show in Frankfurt [during a 1970 European tour opening for the Rolling Stones], Mick Jagger came into the dressing room and started to talk to Junior about a certain harmonica technique. First, Mick played for Junior, who listened carefully. Then, Junior pointed to his head and told Mick that the blues sound Mick was looking for was something he had to feel in his mind. It wasn’t just a matter of playing the instrument. He had to understand what the blues experience was all about and then bring it forth on his own.—Dick Waterman, Between Midnight And Day (2003).
Chicago Blues Festival, part 2
Howlin’ Wolf (with Hubert Sumlin, guitar), live, Chicago, 1966
“How Many More Years”
*****
“Meet Me In The Bottom”
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lagniappe
When I first heard him [Howlin’ Wolf], I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’—Sam Phillips
Chicago Blues Festival, part 1
Muddy Waters (with James Cotton, harmonica; Otis Spann, piano; Pat Hare, guitar; Andrew Stevenson, bass; Francis Clay, drums), “Got My Mojo Working,” live, Newport Jazz Festival, 1960
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lagniappe
Soon after he got to Chicago, Muddy [Waters] began playing the blues for his friends in relaxed moments, and that led to work playing at rent parties, for small tips and all the whiskey he could drink. ‘You know,’ he said, refilling his glass with champagne, ‘I wanted to go to Chicago in the late thirties, ’cause Robert Nighthawk came to see me and said he was goin’ and get a record. He says, you go along and you might get on with me. I thought, oh, man, this cat is just jivin’, he ain’t goin’ to Chicago. I thought goin’ to Chicago was like goin’ out of the world. Finally he split, and the next time I heard he had a record out. So I started asking some of my friends that had went to Chicago, Can I make it with my guitar? ‘Naww, they don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doin’ now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago. So when I finally come to Chicago, the same person that told me that . . . Dan’s wife, my sister, that’s the same person I started playin’ every Saturday night for, at the rent party in her apartment. Peoples is awful funny.’ He chuckled, savoring the irony. ‘So I started playing for these rent parties, and then I run into Blue Smitty and Jimmy Rogers and we got somethin’ goin’ on. We started playing little neighborhood bars on the West Side, five nights a week, five dollars a night. It wasn’t no big money, but we’s doin’ it.’ They were doing it, all right; they were creating modern blues and laying the groundwork for rock and roll.—Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981)
music clip of the day 
