Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC f NatHentoff 'Let Me Hold You for a While This City Is So Cold' • • • I have little patience with revivalism— religious, political (Mondale/Kennedy), or musical. There was a...
...As one Connecticut music writer put it, these three interpret their music with "far more feeling than volume...
...This is a deeply grooving group of alumni from the Muddy Waters band of the 1970s...
...M Choice Cuts The last time I heard Joe Turner, a few years ago, he had to sing sitting down because of the blues in his legs...
...And Kath Bloom, whose voice is somehow simultaneously urgent and calming, lists influences that range from John Coltrane and Billie Holiday to Cezanne...
...So, onward with the fight...
...Or Kath Bloom's "It's Fall Again": "It'sfall again, I just can't listen to your call again/I think I'm going with the leaves again...
...It's the real thing—art without artifice, earned simplicity, with deep roots and yet so personal it's like overhearing a late-night conversation...
...These three Connecticut minnesingers (in their late twenties and early thirties) do indeed create their mosaics from a rich loam of blues, spirituals, and other traditional American forms of "deep song...
...The tunes include some that Joe has virtually made his personal property, so definitive are his versions of them: "Wee Baby Blues," "Cherry Red," "Piney Brown Blues," and "Roll 'em Pete" ("You so beautiful, well, you got to die some day/I want a little loving just before you pass away...
...Walloping proof that blues keep on keeping on is The Legendary Blues Band/ Life of Ease (Rounder 2029...
...The band's foundation is the warm, rocking, room-filling piano of Pinetop Perkins, who goes all the way back to gigs with Robert Nighthawk and Sonny Boy Williamson...
...Originally released in 1956, the session has Joe surrounded by such hot, singing horns as those of trumpeter Joe Newman, alto saxophonist Pete Brown, and trombonist Lawrence Brown...
...That's one distinguishing characteristic...
...Plain as a knife blade, they evoke precipices of feeling through the "total expression" of the performances...
...Or, as Kath Bloom puts it, "We like to whisper...
...true urgency...
...Except these kids had no stories of their own to tell...
...Then came middle-class white boys singing and playing, they thought, just like storied Mississippi Delta blues bards...
...Individually, Loren Mazzacane, an acoustic guitarist whose instrument has become as much a part of him as his breathing, also acknowledges his beginnings in Robert Johnson, Son House, and Robert Nighthawk...
...It didn't make a bit of difference...
...And the lyrics, whether traditional or new, kept reverberating in my memory like facts of nature...
...total expression...
...The distilled feeling in the music and in the words was so strong, though often so soft, that I felt haunted...
...There was a time in pseudo-jazz, for instance, when middle-class white boys tried to sound like black musicians in New Orleans forty years before...
...Like a ghostly presence—as Doc sings in his warm, loving voice—there is the sense of the old twilit man from Mississippi singing his "Candy Man...
...Brown, usually the silken sensualist in Duke Ellington's orchestra, showed here how lustily outspoken he could be...
...Yet the impact is hardly what one would expect from a whisper...
...But the sounds wouldn't leave my mind...
...So I went back and listened to the whole album, and couldn't stop playing it for quite a while...
...voice and instrument one...
...And that's not the only legend from the rainbow heritage of American music that Doc sings back to life in his album...
...But then, of course, that depends on who's doing the whispering...
...I have no idea whether they'll win or not, but this album is a triumph of the spirit that is going to last anyway...
...The group, while not bombarded with bookings, is hopeful because, says Tom Hanford, "We're counting on there being a reaction to the blandness and loudness of popular music...
...Joe's huge, deep, exulting voice filled the room, and then some...
...In reviewing one of Son House's old records, Loren Mazzacane spoke of the bluesman's "total dedication to the material...
...Jerry Portnoy, a Chicagoan, both sings and plays a sizzling, seizing harmonica...
...Blues figure, though not exclusively, in the most satisfying album Doc Watson has made in some years—Doc & Merle Watson/ With T. Michael Coleman (Flying Fish FF 252...
...In this respect, they are like—in their own way—such Delta bluesmen as Son House...
...And this new album, Kath Bloom tells me, "is being played all over the states on various radio stations...
...People are going to want something that's real again...
...What also has addicted me to this album are the lyrics of the new songs...
...This one, engineered by Michael Golub, has it all—and should become a benchmark for future engineers trying to capture the blues whole...
...He's been billed for years as The Boss of the Blues, and he still is...
...A word about the sound: Even these days, blues albums too often lack the fullness of vibrancy that the musicians generate in a club...
...With his son, Merle, on guitar, and bassist T. Michael Coleman, among others, Doc, whose repertory must be among the vastest in folk music, moves through "How Long Blues," Jimmie Rodgers's blue-yodeling "California Blues," and Tom Pax-ton's deeply gentle tribute to Mississippi John Hurt, "Did You Hear John Hurt...
...All of which sounds unbearably eclectic...
...and they create such a natural high that, as The Washington Post has noted, "Even an extended set doesn't seem long enough...
...But if you listen to the album (Daggett Records, 17 Broadway, New Haven, Connect-cut, 06511, $5.50 including postage), you'll hear particular ways of fusing memory, desire, and ceaseless self-searching that are unique to each of the three musicians while also being collectively singular...
...The principal singers are pianist Pinetop Perkins (originally from Belzoni, Mississippi) and bassist Calvin Jones (Greenwood, Mississippi...
...The group also abandons itself to the music...
...Singer-guitarist Tom Hanford has been shaped by Hank Williams as well by black blues forces...
...And that also tells what's going on during Hanford, Bloom, and Mazzacane...
...So, when a new album came in— Hartford, Bloom, and Mazzacane (Daggett DTT-12)—that initially sounded like yet another earnest dipping into other people's souls, I didn't bother to listen to it all the way through...
...The ones who go deep," she says, "but whose art is pure light...
...They've listened long and hard to Charlie Patton, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Joe Taggart, and more...
...That's the title, by the way, of a new Atlantic/Jazzlore reissue album (SD 8812) that has been out of print for much too long...
...For example (without the mu-, sic, 'but still indicative of the power to come), Tom Hanford's "Let Me Hold You for a While": "This day came down so hard/ Like an empty bottle broken in your yard...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
