Now this was more like it. After an underwhelming opening night, the 15th Chicago Blues Festival found its bearings on a frigid Friday, thanks to a gaggle of guitar virtuosos.
Though he found himself caught between a formidable West Side sandwich, with opener Jimmy Dawkins and headliner Otis Rush, Joe Louis Walker delivered the evening’s most memorable set.
Walker is a fortyish Californian who, much like his contemporary Robert Cray, blends the blues with soul and R&B. His recent collaborations with Steve Cropper have deepened the soul connection, and Cropper and former Elvis Presley sidekick Scotty Moore joined Walker on stage for a veritable primer in the evolution of blues guitar.
The trio found common ground in Ike Turner’s 1951 classic “Rocket 88,” widely regarded as the first rock ‘n’ roll song, and Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train,” which Presley covered. The silver-haired Moore, grinning broadly, demonstrated his terse, economical style on these tunes, though he fumbled his solo on a Sunnyland Slim number.
Moore’s less-is-more approach filtered down to Cropper, who began recording in Memphis a decade after Presley made his mark. The pony-tailed Cropper brought a lean nastiness to Booker T and the MG’s “Green Onions,” which he cowrote. Walker’s showpiece was “Sugar,” which he opened with thick mood clusters of guitar notes, then turned into a suggestive romp with a playful harp solo.
Walker’s guitar playing was steeped in blues tradition, but it pushed against rock boundaries with its distorted, reverberating audacity. Rush had a tough act to follow, but the towering Chicagoan in the Stetson hat was not to be easily outdone.
With a four-piece horn section pushing him hard, Rush came out blasting, a menacing lefthander playing his trademark upside-down guitar. He opened with a long instrumental that whipped up funnel clouds of notes. Though Rush ignored his best-known songs and generally stayed away from the gut-wrenching, minor-key wailers that established him as a blues giant in the ’50s, he was hardly going through the motions. The interplay with his excellent band suggested hard-swinging jazz as he stretched five songs across an hour, bringing it all home with a horn-spackled homage to blues-guitar patriarch T-Bone Walker on “Stormy Monday.”
Dawkins brought his brand of West Side blues on stage first; the leader’s guitar sounded like a rusty buzzsaw cutting through barbed wire, a tone matched by the honkin’ sax of Eddie Shaw.
But as with many main-stage performers at this year’s festival, Dawkins clearly thought he had more time than he did, and his set ended abruptly and in disarray just as he was digging into John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen.”
