Tribune critic: Black clubs essential to blues as art form

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-26/entertainment/ct-ae-1127-blues-clubs-20111126_1_chicago-blues-lee-s-unleaded-blues-blues-landscape/4

Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich, in a long article Nov. 27, 2011,  nudged the arts community toward recognizing and promoting the blues as a Chicago treasure.  

"How long," Reich's article asks, "can a music that long flourished on the South and West sides — where the blues originators lived their lives and performed their songs — stay viable when most of the neighborhood clubs have expired? How long can a black musical art form remain dynamic when presented to a largely white audience in settings designed to replicate and merchandise the real thing? At stake is a music that gave rise to jazz, gospel, pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop — the pillars, really, of the American sound."

 Reich quotes  veteran harmonica player and author Lincoln T. Beauchamp Jr. (aka Chicago Beau): "The consequence of what's happening is that people will play other types of music in order to be paid — not that they ever got paid worth a damn working at Chicago clubs anyway...Places like Kingston Mines will always sell the blues brand...But you can't look to the clubs and the club owners to pursue blues as a culture. It is to them purely a commodity, nothing more than a bottle of whiskey, and how much money you can make off of it."

Poet and critic Sterling Plumpp notes: "I don't know the business of blues, but it seems that the bookings that the North Side blues clubs do is incapable of identifying and nurturing young talent... I'm reluctant to say it, but it's probably true: At some point, the African-American community has been remiss in thoroughly supporting the best of African-American blues. I have to say that. They are not in the clubs... It's going through a phase where the premier (blues) places are not located in the African-American community."

"We need to market this music the way New Orleans and Austin have marketed their musical legacy, says Janice Monti, chair of sociology at Dominican University in River Forest and the driving force behind an international blues symposium there
.
"In the South, soul blues is played on the radio. Where is blues played on the radio in Chicago? If you want to create a vibrant climate for the clubs, you have to educate the audience."

Reich concludes, in a call to action: "And you have to build it. You have to ensure that the music hasn't been repositioned to serve conventioneers and expense-account visitors above all others. For without a healthy local audience and a network of neighborhood listening rooms, the blues becomes a shell of what it once was."

see also the accompanying video, featuring club owners and sax man Eddie Shaw:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/videogallery/66302960/Entertainment/Blues-clubs-in-Chicago#pl-66304233

Endangered Blues Part IV: Big Biz Squashes Out Good Music

 This month Latin jazz musicians are suing the Recording Academy over a controversial decision to eliminate two dozen Grammy awards categories of ethnic and roots music

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/record-labels/neil-portnow-on-latin-jazz-grammy-elimination-1005304552.story

Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich, just before the 2011 Chicago Blues Fest, shedded some light on the under-valuing of American roots music. Like many things it can be traced to the shortsighted non-leadership of big business.

HOWARD REICH , 21^st Century Blues: Can an Ancestral Art Form Survive? Chicago Tribune June 3, 2011 (print version June 5)

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/entertainment/ct-ae-0605-blues-three-generations-20110603_1_chicago-blues-festival-country-music-21st-century-blues

Reich quotes  singer Shemekia Copeland, age 32: "My big dream was to make blues music mainstream…I love the music so much, and I think it has a right to be just as big as, say, country music is. But, unfortunately, we just don't have the resources."

The infrastructure of music in America, Reich points out— the ways in which sounds are disseminated online, through the airwaves and via cable — gives little push to any musical genre that doesn't already command massive sales.  This doesn’t mean one can’t make money on blues, jazz, folk, Native American music—maybe just not millions. But who is to say what might be possible if promotion were put behind it?

"Why is the blues marginal? Because in America, everything is about what's new, what's new, what's new," Reich quotes Copeland, daughter of the late blues-guitar master Johnny "Clyde" Copeland. "They don't respect old people, they don't respect anything old. And it irritates me when I go to other places (such as Europe) and I see how they treat things, and how much they respect things. Here, it's like: Who's got the new album? Who's got the No. 1 thing? When's the new iPod 6 coming out?"

The irony is that all this new stuff is here today, gone tomorrow—while blues and other rooted music that expresses true human feelings, goes on for years and years.

Like Copeland, veteran Chicago singer-harmonica player Billy Branch — a generation older — also bristles at the neglect accorded this music, which is why he and others have been bringing it into the Chicago public schools for more than three decades. His Blues in the Schools program has introduced songs of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Big Walter Horton to kids who otherwise wouldn't hear them.

"It's about cultural heritage — that children don't know their past," Branch, 59, told Reich. "I have talked to every ethnic group on the planet. I've even done Blues in the Schools in Japan.  But in the case of younger African-American children in the inner city, they have very little to hold on to, and a lot of times they come in, their heads are down and they look sad. This isn't all the time or across the board. But the main thing I try to impart to them is that this is your people's music, and without this there would be no Beyonce, there would be no Michael Jackson.

Branch notes that the blues blossomed from the bloody fields of slavery. Ever since, the blues and the culture that created it have fought mightily to be heard.

"Willie Dixon sent a mimeographed letter to every member of Congress…(saying) there was a conspiracy to keep the blues off the radio," recalled Branch, who toured and recorded with Dixon for years.  "His reasoning was this: If it becomes apparent that my music is just as rich or valuable as your music — or even more so — then what basis do I have to discriminate against you?
"So he linked the culture and discrimination and social injustice to the lack of airplay of the blues. Which was pretty deep. Willie also used to say that we were fooled into believing that blues was low-class and dirty, lowdown music."

So this may be one reason blues men and women have gone along for years with their second class status, while the industry passes them by in favor of the bland, robotic, noisy, insulting trash that now fills the airways. Hiphop artists even complain that within their genre, thoughtful songs seem to get bypassed in favor of dirty lyrics.

 Maybe it’s time to quit accepting this state of things. Billy Branch tells young Black kids: "This is something to be proud of. Your people gave birth to this music we call the blues." 

All of us as Americans should lift up this music. These days, we need the blues to combat the blues being politically and economically forced upon us.  Shemekia says there are no “resources” to promote blues and soul music. But Frederick Douglass said power concedes nothing without a fight.  Maybe we need to demand a share of the pie.