Bob Putignano / Quote - NY Daily News
The Rebirth Of The Blues
by Isaac Guzman
Published on February, 04, 2003
Late one night in 1903, a musician named W.C. Handy was standing on a railway platform in Tutwiler, Miss., when he heard a beguiling sound. A man was singing in a low moan and playing his guitar with a knife pressed against the strings, creating what Handy later described as "the weirdest music I'd ever heard."
The man was playing the blues with a primitive form of slide guitar.
Handy resolved right then to popularize the style - he went on to write the famous "St. Louis Blues" - but he had no idea that the sound of the rural Delta would become one of the greatest influences on popular music.
Friday night at Radio City, the organizers of the "Salute to the Blues" concert hope to foster another century of interest. The concert will match stars such as Aerosmith, India.Arie, Macy Gray and Bonnie Raitt with celebrated blues artists including B.B. King, Shemekia Copeland, Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown and James (Blood) Ulmer.
"There's going to be a lot of tremendous pairings of old and new," says producer Alex Gibney. "We're putting together the roots and the fruits. It'll start in Africa, move up the Mississippi to Chicago, to Great Britain and all around the world."
The concert, a benefit for the Blues Music Foundation - a group aiding music preservation and education, among other goals - is sold out except for $1,250 orchestra seats. But director Anton Fuqua ("Training Day," "Bait") will tape the show for PBS, which will air it in the fall along with seven blues-related movies by filmmakers including Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders and Mike Figgis.
A BIG YEAR FOR BLUES
That's just a part of a year-long blues blitz - concerts, educational forums and other events - organized in part by Martin Scorsese, who has extended his passion for film preservation and history to the blues.
The attention, according to the music's aficionados, is long overdue.
Like jazz, the blues has become something of a rarified form, replete with preservation societies and tempestuous arguments, but only a trickle of new fans. In the last decade, many blues artists have struggled to find clubs to play and labels to release their music.
"You've got people who have won Handy Awards [the blues equivalent of Grammys] who are having a hard time keeping themselves on the road or keeping their record contract," says Bob Putignano, president of the New York Blues and Jazz Society. "And a lot of the labels have decided to either go out of business or not put out just blues anymore."
Some performers think that's because blues purists have created an unofficial set of standards on which they judge all newcomers.
That notion of the "real blues" has become a straitjacket, these musicians claim.
"You have a select group of people who are involved in the blues and who hold on to the real traditional blues tightly," says Harlem-born Copeland, 23, daughter of Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland.
"That kind of stops the artists from doing anything new, and that's not a good thing. Because you're afraid that the people who love the blues will say that it's not bluesy enough," she adds.
Copeland has been celebrated as one of the genre's bright new artists because, she says, she has refused to sing the typical "'my baby done left me' songs."
She still hasn't learned who she'll be performing with on Friday, but she sings two songs by J.B. Lenoir in Wenders' documentary "The Soul of a Man," one of the films to be shown on PBS.
In the film, Wenders ("Buena Vista Social Club") also deals with the lives and careers of Skip James and Blind Willie Johnson, using their recordings and covers of their songs by current musicians including Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Nick Cave, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cassandra Wilson and Los Lobos.
SOMETHING BORROWED...
The producers have been secretive about the details of Friday night's show, but Gibney says the audience can look forward to a pairing of bluegrass star Alison Krauss with experimental bluesman Ulmer.
Like the melding of pop and blues that brought Raitt new fame with the 1989 album "Nick of Time," that kind of cross-pollination might prove to be essential.
"The blues needs more of a crossover shot in the arm," says Putignano, who also presents a blues-oriented radio show on WFDU (89.1 FM). "People are getting dull on it, because it hasn't evolved. There's got to be more fresh ideas brought to the fray."
The producers, filmmakers and musicians hope that "The Blues" might replicate the surprising success of the old-time folk music from the soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" They believe that if people get a chance to feel the blues' visceral power, they'll be hooked.
"The blues is not played on MTV and it's not on VH1 or any of those stations, and it's hardly on the radio," Copeland says. "So this'll just put it in people's faces. And the blues is definitely not over. When Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and Albert King died, then you had people like my father and Lonnie Brooks and Gatemouth Brown and all of these other cats playing. So it will go on."
Copyright 2003, NY Daily News