Ask any rock musician, record executive or concert promoter, and they`ll tell you that the blues has become the hottest, fastest growing musical commodity around.
Rock and pop musicians are practically falling all over themselves to record with the likes of septuagenarian blues master John Lee Hooker (to date, the list has included Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, George Thorogood, and Los Lobos). Chicago`s B.L.U.E.S. club, on North Halsted Street, last week opened a new branch in Manhattan (called Chicago B.L.U.E.S.); and CD packages by the likes of Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith have been strong sellers
internationally.
But all the hype and hoopla fail to point out one critical fact: Much of the music being packaged and marketed as blues is only superficially related to the real thing. In other words, much of today`s ”blues” is actually a high-decibel, musically crude facsimile that`s closer to commercial rock than to authentic blues expression.
And that`s why three performances coming up at the Benson and Hedges Blues `91 festival (see adjoining schedule) stand out.
When the curtain goes up on John Lee Hooker (Friday at the Riviera Theatre) and Sunnyland Slim and Jimmy Walker (both Oct. 25 at the Cultural Center), listeners will be able to hear the blues as the sophisticated, complex musical form it long has been, rather than the diluted, rock-driven commercial music it is becoming.
”The youngsters now, they`re not playing no blues, no way,” says Walker, who, at 86, ought to know. Born in Memphis and raised in Chicago, Walker began listening to the first generation of great blues artists when he was a 7-year-old, cleaning up at the legendary, long-gone Pekin Theatre on the South Side.
”Back then, I was hearing Bessie Smith and Lonnie Johnson and Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith,” adds Walker. ”That`s the blues.
”The young players today are really playing rock `n` roll and trying to call it blues. They`re trying to make rock sound like blues, but they don`t even know what the blues is.”
Listen to Walker play piano, and it`s difficult to disagree. His right hand, in particular, plays flourishes so fast, so rhythmically complex and so rich in dissonance that his music easily ranks with the most sophisticated jazz.
By contrast, walk into most blues clubs, and you`ll often hear amplified sounds dispatched at the fearsome decibel levels of traditional rock. Only the standard blues chord changes and the cliche of the flatted third and seventh notes in the scale bear relation to genuine blues music.
”What the kids don`t realize is that if you play the music so loud, it can`t be the blues, because you can`t really hear it,” adds Walker, demonstrating a characteristically intricate keyboard lick running from his right hand to his left.
”See? How are you going to feel that music if it`s hitting you in the head so loud?
”Now, the new player may be good at copying some things we might have been doing 40 or 50 years ago, but that`s the only thing he can do.”
Like Walker, most of the early blues players were self-taught, picking up a few ideas by watching the pros and then building a music that was all their own.
Walker, for instance, draws a shimmering, glittering sound from his keyboard. Sunnyland, at 83, has an entirely different kind of virtuosity:
Tremolo octaves, rapidly alternating chords in both hands and a thrilling falsetto singing voice make him sound like no one else. And Hooker, 73, coaxes a chanting sound from his guitar, which accompanies his similarly hushed and mesmerizing vocals.
Each of these artists has forged a unique language, though based on the 19th Century chord progressions of the blues and, before that, the harmonies of church music mixed with the melodies and rhythms of ancient African sounds. ”I learned about playing guitar from watching my stepfather, Will Moore, and he probably learned from his daddy,” says Hooker, whose incantatory singing and playing suggest ancient forms of African melody.
”See, the spirit of the blues began when the world began, I know that. When a woman and a man was born, blues was born.
”And I believe everything came out of blues-spirituals, jazz, rock `n`
roll. Rock `n` roll ain`t nothing but the blues stepped up.”
But the commercial explosion of rock in the `60s, though based on some blues ideas, in turn transformed much of the blues; in fact, rock changed blues in a dramatic way not matched by its effect on jazz and other forms of black music. For all the ”jazz-fusion” groups of the `70s, for all the electrified gospel sounds of the same period and thereafter, these musics retained their sophistication and expanded on it.
But blues, especially in recent years, has become a new form of mass-marketed musical entertainment. As such, many of its younger practitioners cling to the simplistic ideas of rock `n` roll rather than the complex expressions of the source.
Even Hooker, who won the first Grammy of his roller-coaster career last year, acknowledges that ”even though my own playing didn`t change over the years, my sound did because of the (younger) musicians I had around me.
”I had the same bottom, the same sound as always, but it was in a different setting.”
Little wonder, then, that Hooker won the belated Grammy for his duet with a pop singer a generation younger than he, Bonnie Raitt on ”In the Mood.”
Obviously, music is constantly changing, and the infusion of new blood is not automatically a deficit.
Yet in the case of the blues, the rising popularity of the form has meant, in many instances, a kind of musical decay.
Even a brilliant artist such as Sugar Blue, a young Chicago harmonica player who handles his instrument with incredible virtuosity, generally plays clubs where the sound systems make everything sound like overamplified rock
`n` roll.
It matters little how subtle and sophisticated Sugar Blue`s ideas may be; at those volume levels, his playing tends to sound like still more rock `n`
roll, albeit with a touch of blues.
When Hooker, Walker and Sunnyland take the stage, however, it`s a different story altogether. Here is blues in uncorrupted form.
Whether their highly sophisticated approach to blues will disappear after they`re gone remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: Their particular sounds will last only so long as they are still playing.
Like all the best artists, their individual voices cannot be copied or merchandised-it`s simply too sophisticated to be mimicked.
”I`ve had music professors come to my home, watch what I do on a keyboard, and they still can`t do it,” says Walker with a big laugh.
”You can`t copy what I do, you can`t teach it, you can`t write it down on a piece of paper,” adds Walker, who still practices four hours a day.
”See, the older I got, the richer the sound. There`s more and more in it, the more I find on my piano.”
