A Celebration of Eclecticism

25th Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival brings worlds of music together

In loving memory of Luther Allison, who saw the Blues walking like a natural man.

Detroit blues bands are sometimes kind of a risk. What is billed as old-fashioned, down-home electric blues winds up being the kind of red-neck blues rock that makes guys wave their Jack Daniels hats in the air and hoot.

REVIEW
	Blues and Jazz Festival Gallup Park Friday, Sept. 5 - Sunday, Sept. 7

It is precisely for this reason that Johnnie Bassett and the Blues Insurgents are such a gust of sweet, blue air. Bassett himself has a tasty, thick baritone that makes audience members lean over and whisper to their neighbors. The band members themselves are good players, maybe a bit on the average side, excepting the horn players, both of whom turned in at least two excellent solos apiece.

Bassett's set had standards ("Muddy Water") and some of his truly entertaining originals, "The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same" and "I Love a Good Woman, But I Like The Bad Ones Too." Glued together with erudite guitar work and great theatrical sense, it seemed a shame that Bassett was confined to the role of opener.

Have you ever seen a blues band with two huge mountains of amps, like it was sharing a bus with Pantera? Have you ever seen a blues legend in overalls and a Reebok headband? Have you ever seen that same legend equally at home with Tampa Red and Jimi Hendrix? That is the Buddy Guy Experience.

His set opened with a razor-sharp and rocket-fast "Got My Mojo Workin'", faster than even the original. From there, Guy slowed down the tweaked crowd with a massive "Hootchie Cootchie Man" (complete with the dirty verse that starts out "She got one leg to the east / She got one leg to the west." You get the idea.) Languidly and self-indulgently, the song drifted into a tortured and strangely soft "Love Her With A Feelin'" before rolling to a halt.

It was the quiet ones that were dangerous. Buddy Guy plays a loud show, as a general rule. The two stacks on the side of the stage aren't for bluffing. But he has this way of beginning a slow and fitful blues at a very low volume, playing softly and pining with his high tenor voice. When the song approaches an emotional climax or similar moment, Guy immediately brings himself and the band up to an ear-bleeding intensity instantly because the sound is up so high anyway.

And while we're on the subject - a few words about Buddy Guy's voice. The high tenor is a dying art. A lot of mediocre blues singers will try to cover up a lack of talent or feeling with a fake baritone or pinched growl. Guy is the genuine article, with a high, anguished voice that comes from the august likes of Son House, J.B. Lenior and John Mayall. The amazing thing about it is how it can go from soft and pleading to ecstatic in about three seconds flat. The technique is great, but the execution is breathtaking.

The second half of his set was interesting, to say the absolute least. Guy began with talking about influences that all modern guitarists share, followed by a thunderous 30 seconds of John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom." He then talked about a few of the "young" players today, Hendrix and Clapton, and accompanied his examples with "Strange Brew" and a huge version of "Red House." Swatches of "Johnnie B. Goode" and "Mustang Sally" followed. Proof, indeed, if proof were needed, that Guy has a strong command of all the guitar's dialects.

You know you've been to a good concert when your only complaint is that there wasn't an encore.

The Saturday festival was a bit more of a mixed bag. Fortunately, Lady X and the Sunshine Band was at the front of the bag. Playing mostly originals like "The Blues Is Alright" and "I Don't Care," Lady X made the most of the traditional R&B band format (i.e. small horn section, two guitars, rhythm section.) Ms. X has that kind of dense, powerful voice that had to have been nurtured in a church, grown under the light of a stained glass window. She moved easily between the highly melismatic gospel styles to the more declarative styles of the blues. Act No. 1 was a success.

The second group, Mudpuppy, did even better. The lead singer had one of those great, masculine, Teddy Pendergrass kind of voices that you could listen to all day. Songs like "Too Poor" and the Joe Cocker classic "You Can Leave Your Hat On" shone like jellied fire, on singing alone.

To prove that the rest of the band had just as much smoke, the pianist led an awesome version of the venerable "Down in New Orleans" with even more vocal might. The group's set strayed into auxiliary percussion (spoons and bones) with the aptly titled "Spoonful" and "The Plumber," as well as the old, reliable "You Got Me Runnin.'" Mudpuppy is what a soul band should sound like - dipped in the mud behind the Stax studio.

Lavell White, the third act, was a disappointment. Despite her age and impressive résumé, her voice is weak and uninspiring, her band is bland and unconvincing and her set was rambling, dull and fairly rotten. She spent about 10 minutes on a rambling, dead-end song, inciting the uninterested crowd to "go and take your drawers off." Not even that worked.

Big Jack Johnson and the Oilers did better for itself. Johnson's band provided a strong and interesting platform for his excellent, and heavily Chicago, guitar work. His "Boom Boom" and "Got My Mojo Workin'" were very good, as were his versions of Guitar Slim's "The Things That I Used To Do" and "That's Alright, Mama." Decent, if not great.

I'm not really sure what to say about Don Byron's set. Byron is one of the most inventive and courageous musicians in jazz today, experimenting freely with Klezmer, avant-garde and Dixie elements with equal fluidity. But this doesn't lend itself to a festival crowd all that well. The crowd (myself included) didn't seem that into his set. A good man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And now for the great Medeski, Martin and Wood. MMW is the musical equivalent of Play-Dough. It's experimental trio jazz. Squeeze it one way it turns into funk. Pressure on another plane yields solid groove. What I found most intriguing, being a casual fan, was that I kept thinking I wasn't enjoying the show, until I realized that I had been staring intently at them for about a half an hour and bobbling my head like a white man at a wedding reception the whole time. It grows on you.

Enjoy the manic keyboard work from John Medeski for a few minutes until it becomes the bass work of Chris Wood, which leads into Billy Martin's drums.

The greatest praise I can give MMW is that the festival that day went from strict, puritanical R&B, to Chicago blues, to avant-garde jazz to super-hipster jazz funk and everyone still had a good time.

Happy 25th to the Blues and Jazz Festival, a monument to eclecticism.

JONATHAN KRAFT/Daily
Marcia Ball lets it all out at the Blues and Jazz Festival yesterday.

JONATHAN KRAFT/Daily
Ann Arbor's own Shakey Jake boogies down with a fan at the Blues and Jazz Festival at Gallup Park on Saturday.

09-08-97