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

BRAVO: Blues Racial Awareness and Vision Organizing week

Aug. 25 to Sept. 1:

  A time at the end of summer to look into the history of the blues, find out how greed and racism are impacting the music, and envision a new future of peace, justice and fun.

What's wrong with this picture? It's the cover of a 1969 album "Fathers and Sons" produced by Marshall Chess, featuring Muddy Waters with some talented young white blues proteges.

Yes, people of all ethnic groups can play and enjoy the blues. I'm blessed to play the piano. But blues is an art form rooted in the black community. Cut off the roots and the tree will die.  And without strong Black kings and queens to lead us into the future, this beloved American music is in great danger.

So where are the Black sons and daughters of this blues Father who is passing on the spark of life?  From the lineups of many so-called blues festivals today, one might think they don't exist. They exist all right, in Chicago and across the country, but only a handful manage to get promoted while the music business continues to churn out phony acts and imitators. 

Too many dreams have been deferred. Feelings came to a head this past week in a dialog following racially insensitive remarks by Bruce Iglauer, CEO of the successful blues and roots label Alligator Records, in the Chicago Reader.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/gyrobase/alligator-records-40th-anniversary/Content?oid=3834565&show=comments

But one man alone did not build up this complicated System that is keeping good blues artists down. As in the New Jim Crow mass incarceration system, many forces are at work. This week, please look at some of the history this blog, duplicated in my Facebook Notes, and in the BLOG section of my website www.barrelhousebonni.com

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What are the racial and economic dynamics keeping good African American blues men and women from promotion and success?

2. What do we want to see instead? Can we get a critical mass in consensus?

3.  How can blues business people, media, musicians and fans act to change things from the way things are to the way we want them to be?

Please post your comments (respectful, and focusing on the System rather than personalities) on this BRAVO Week entry..  Knowledge is power, and truth speaks louder than all the lies that have built up over the past 50 years.

I'll report the results here and in Facebook Notes and other blogs. BRAVO to you for taking time to think about this.

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.

Endangered Blues III: The Unhandy Truth about Blues Foundation

 Blues Foundation: The Un-Handy Truth

Look around the country at the lineups at so-called “blues festivals.” You’ll often find they’re headlined by a rock star or by one of a handful of famous aging African American blues men or women.  The rest of the lineups tend to be white bands. Where are the baby boom generation of Chicago’s African American musicians—the ones who learned directly from Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters? Do they exist?

Yes. They’re here, right in Chicago and many other places in the U.S. But they’re not getting hired or promoted, thanks in large part to a national organization whose stated purpose is “preserving our blues music history, celebrating recording and performance excellence, supporting blues education and ensuring the future of this uniquely American art form.” The Blues Foundation in Memphis is a much more influential nonprofit organization than its membership roll of less than 4000 would indicate. It affiliates with over 200 local blues societies around the world, and its two annual awards contests set the tone for blues festivals everywhere. Its annual budget is around $650,000.

The Blues Foundation, www.blues.org , could potentially be a force for spreading blues music into new markets and educating school kids. But its board is dominated by record companies who closely guard their small market share instead of trying to win new fans. So far the Foundation’s main activities are not educational, but competitive: the International Blues Challenge, and the Blues Music Awards, formerly named after the African American composer W.C. Handy.

The BF took Handy’s name off the Blues Music Award around 2006--not a good sign. To enter this annual Grammy-style award judging, an artist must issue a record within the current year. It’s hard for locally known, non-wealthy African American artists to get records out every year.  The record business has suffered from pirated downloads and store closings. Older record companies, including Chicago’s Alligator Records, have been signing only a tiny few emerging African American blues artists, and Alligator owner Bruce Iglauer has drawn fire for admitting it. A newer label, Calfornia’s Delta Groove, likewise promotes white artists and a sprinkling of older black musicians. These labels buy lots of ads in American “blues” magazines, which are increasingly lacking in articles about black artists.  

In 2010, a majority of Blues Music Award winners were white; an  Elvis Presley style act from California took three major awards. Of Black winners, only one was younger than 65, and there were NO Black nominees for Best New Artist. This year Black winners slightly outnumbered whites, 14 to 11, but are still mostly old.

Blues Foundation’s International Challenge includes even a lower percentage of black artists. Each blues society chooses its top solo-duo act and band in a local contest. Each act has to raise money to travel to Memphis for the annual competition. Professional African American acts have a hard time in these local contests, because the judges tend to be white and the Foundation offers no definitions of “blues” to guide their decisions.

Examples:  In 2002, I watched Chicago soul singer Nellie Tiger Travis and guitarist Tyree Neal, grandson of Louisiana bluesman Raful Neal, bring down the house in their semifinal and final rounds, only to lose to a little known rock band sponsored by a Canada restaurant owner

In 2006 I saw my friend Larry Hill Taylor’s band of 30 year professional Chicago West Side bluesmen lose a local contest in Marietta, Ohio after playing their own arrangements of traditional tunes by Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Magic Sam. The winner was a local rock band that had added a few blues tunes to its repertoire of head-banging noise featured on Myspace.

Two sources close to the judging told me later that Larry’s band lost because they played no original tunes. But as Larry points out, clever lyrics may add to the fun, but feelings are the main point of the blues.  “Blues is a tradition, all down from the time of slavery, then coming up here from Mississippi. It’s just like an old religion. Artists always start out by playing favorite traditional tunes people like, then they create their own.” Go to any hole in the wall club on the West and South Side and watch how blues performers build community spirit through familiar tunes, feeling and groove. The contest judges may not understand how blues works in the community.

None of this would matter so much if the IBC was just a fun contest. But the contest winners are rewarded with slots at national festivals. Also, promoters often fill their festival rosters with amateurs they see on stage at the IBC, who come cheaper than professional heritage musicians. One hand washes another, and the Blues Foundation has created one big happy family. An increasingly color-less family.

Does racism motivate these promoters and contest-makers?  One cannot judge their hearts but the results are obvious.  The current generation of professional blues men and women in Chicago, sons and daughters by blood or by spirit of the Howlin’ Wolves, Koko Taylors, and Muddy Waters—are being passed over in favor of imitators, even in so-called blues festivals. And unlike the 1960s and 70s, rock festivals seem to have no slots for blues artists..  (Are the rock boys scared of being shown up by the blues men and women on stage?)Unless this generation show success in their careers, younger African American artists will not take up the music.

So why do I care?

Let me put it this way. If I ever go to Scotland, the home country of my father’s parents, I would be dismayed if I found nobody playing bagpipes. The pipes are the soul of Scotland and Ireland.

Just like that, blues is the root of American popular music—an expression of true human feelings. It goes back to Africa, the birthplace of all humanity.

Blues will never die. People will still sing and play the blues in some cottonfield or back alley. But what America offers on stage might end up only a pale, watered-down version of this nation’s greatest contribution to world culture. We can’t be satisfied. Not with so many talented blues men and women ready to shine. Their time is now. 

Endangered Blues II: Disrespect and Greed

II. Disrespect and Greed: A History of Blues Biz Ripoffs 

In addition to the overall American neglect of history and the arts, the natural progression of music being handed down in African American families and neighborhoods has been interrupted. And while some promoters in the majority European-American culture prize Black music, their respect doesn’t extend to the people who create it. Disrespect and greed have led to the music ripoffs that nobody wants to talk about, but we must try to get an understanding of the history behind this.

We only need to go back to the 1950s, when black musicians like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Fats Domino revved up the blues a little bit and created rock’n’roll. In his Sun studio in Memphis, the white promoter Sam Phillips was recording Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas, Ike Turner and other Black blues, R&B and rock’n’roll artists. Not only did he see black teenagers buying their music; white teens started combing through the R&B record bins as well. On dance floors everywhere, even in the segregated South, the music was bringing young Americans of all backgrounds together.

There was just one big obstacle to Phillips’ sales: some white radio DJs refused to play black artists’ records, even though white fans wanted to hear them. Phillips decided to find a white artist to sing black music. Elvis Presley always acknowledged where the music came from. The tragedy was not that Elvis succeeded, but that Phillips stopped promoting the blues men. He and other white promoters went on to make a lot of money, and the originators of the music got left behind. White music biz usurpers took blues licks and lyrics without permission, failing to pay black songwriters like Arthur Crudup who penned Elvis’ famous “That’s All Right.” ( See the story in  Chapple and Garofalo’s book Rock n roll is here to pay.). 

History repeated itself in the 1960s, when British rock bands rediscovered the blues and made records based on blues songs. American music media constantly credits the British invaders for popularizing blues among the white audience after the music business focus had moved on to soul and funk. And for awhile, blues leaders like Muddy Waters rode the wave. But during the 1980s and 90s, rockers and their promoters intercepted the blues, turning their backs on many black audiences who still treasured their own music.  Jim O’Neal editor of Living Blues Magazine, March/April 1990, acknowledged: “The young black bluesman has no easy road to success even when he is heard.”

The 1969 album Fathers and Sons, produced by Marshall Chess of the famous Chess label in Chicago, features Muddy Waters playing with young white blues adopters like Paul Butterfield. On the cover, imitating Michelangelo’s painting, a Black human deity passes the spark of life to a white Adam.  Where were the African American sons and daughters of this black music god?

Art Tipaldi’s book Children of the Blues, 2002, portrayed a few black inheritors, like Lonnie Brooks’ sons Ronnie and Wayne, carrying on their dad’s blues guitar tradition. But the book omitted other inheritors, replacing them with chapters on white musicians. For example, guitarist Eddie Taylor’s active musical sons were not mentioned: Eddie Jr. on guitar, Tim on drums, and stepson Larry on vocals and drums. (Daughter Demetria is now an active singer as well.) Instead, Tipaldi wrote up some white Texas musicians who learned the blues trade from Eddie Taylor Sr. and other Chicago bluesmen who played during the 1970s and 80s at Austin’s famous club, Antones.

Chicago’s African American musicians are not much of a position to protest their lack of recognition. Over 40 years after Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the economic effects of racism continue to haunt them. Because of high unemployment and less-than-equal city services in the city’s poor black neighborhoods, wages are meager in the West and South Side clubs where musicians start their careers.

Politicians often consider these little juke joints and lounges to have no cultural value. Brushing off protest letters from around the world and musical pleas from the blues men and women, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration in 2001 tore down the historic stores on Maxwell Street, the birthplace of electric Chicago blues. The same year, the city padlocked Gerri’s Palm Tavern, a South Side landmark where Count Basie and Muddy Waters once hung out.  

Chicago’s downtown clubs used to be the place where black musicians could earn good money. But today’s handful of tourist blues clubs are drastically underpaying the musicians. While patrons pay $10-20 at the door, wages have dropped, not increased, over the last 20 years. Club owners have exploited rivalries among the band leaders who squabble over the handful of spots. Today most musicians are lucky to take home $60 to $100 for an evening’s work. Other tourist clubs promote and pay white imitators ahead of hometown African American heritage musicians. This has become obvious even to the conservative Chicago Tribune’s critic Kevin Williams, who mocked the “talking dog act” featuring Buddy Guy’s latest young white guitar protégé  (the epitome of the Chess image of Black blues god/ white inheritor) in a writeup Jan. 28, 2011.  

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-28/entertainment/ct-ott-0128-quinn-sullivan-20110128_1_buddy-guy-s-legends-blues-quinn-sullivan

Many musicians hesitate to speak out. They don’t feel they can change the rivalries or the unfair wages. When harmonica player and bandleader Billy Branch criticized the promotion of young white guitarists ahead of veteran African American players in 1998, he lost work and declined to talk any more about the issue when critic David Whiteis interviewed him in the 2006 book Chicago Blues : Portraits and Stories.

When Larry Hill Taylor, a singer and drummer, protested and spoke to French Avergne Blues Society magazine in 2005 about working conditions in the Chicago tourist clubs, including instances of unnamed club owners paying addicted musicians in helpings of drugs instead of cash, he lost his bookings in the clubs.  Read the whole story in his autobiography, which I co-authored: www.stepsonoftheblues.com

West and South Side heritage musicians do not have the resources to promote themselves; they stretch to even own a car, fill it with gas, and keep Chicago’s notorious traffic tickets at bay. . Alligator Records CEO Bruce Iglauer does pay royalties to musicians. But he told an audience at the 2011 Chicago blues fest that poverty plays a part in his decisions not to record some of these local blues masters. 

These are a few examples of how ignorance, disrespect, racism and greed have nearly destroyed the soul of America’s greatest music. Heritage musicians are underpaid, persecuted for speaking out.  Their music platforms are now being invaded by imitators from all corners of the world, who pay good money for guitars and contest slots. But no one is paying the creators of the music these imitators and hobbyists are trying to play.

White musicians and fans who do care about these injustices find it hard to speak out  because, as I mentioned before, the whole American arts community is underpaid.  I feel we must find it in our hearts to speak anyway. 

 NEXT:  the Un-Handy Truth about Blues Festivals.

Endangered Chicago Blues I: The Root

I.                   Blues is the Root          

Feeling vulnerable to the Great Recession and at the mercy of illogical governments and corporate bullies, we can all use a little musical relief. The futuristic writer Kurt Vonnegut, shortly before his death in 2007, called African American music “America’s greatest contribution to the world.” He added, “Blues is the remedy for a world-wide epidemic of depression.” 

Blues is music of survival. It’s about real feelings. It grew up from the ground. It gives voice to the human spirit.  As Chicago’s esteemed producer, composer and bass player, the late Willie Dixon, often said, “Blues is the root. Other music is the fruit.”  

Singing together about feelings, joys and sorrows, both in church and in the juke joint, helped African Americans in the early 20^th century South cope with long work hours, low pay, unfair and racist bosses. Blues shares one’s personal story with the community. Blues has a call and a response, a rhythm and a swing.  The music makes you feel better. Watch a blues audience, eyes half closed, tapping their toes—or in a lively mood, shouting out their comments on the singer’s story.

If it’s so good, why is real live heritage blues so hard to find?

Some say Chicago blues is dead. The British author of the definitive book Chicago Blues, was saying that already in 1972. It died the same year as America’s innocence, in 2001, when the city tore down the historic musical haunts, Maxwell Street and Gerri’s Palm Tavern.

Still, 10 years later, you can find African American bands playing to their neighborhood crowd in a handful of tiny juke joints on the West and South Side. A few musicians sling a guitar, bass or drumsticks in downtown clubs for mostly-white tourists, but they are underpaid. Why is the blues, the root of all rock’n’roll, R&B and parent of hiphop, revered around the world—barely visible in Sweet Home Chicago and other American cities?  Some possible answers:

As baby boomers growing up, we were exposed to all types of music on the radio:  classical, folk, bluegrass, R&B, jazz. It’s hard to tune in anything now except hiphop, rock, country, and a bit of Christian contemporary music. Some of the words are clever but the music is often very lame.  Most pop music these days is not created by artists, but manufactured by corporations who design and mass-test it to reach what they think appeals to the greatest number of people.

Many young people are not developing a taste for different kinds of music, because they get little or no instruction in music and art (or phys ed; and often no recess) in school, thanks to the No Child Left Behind law.  Students can find blues on the internet, including videos of Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Koko Taylor and Howlin’ Wolf—if they know to look for it. Unless they’ve seen the movie Cadillac Records, featuring Beyonce, many youth have never heard of the blues. 

American corporate culture constantly preaches the next new thing to buy. Music from the past is scorned. The media has reinforced this amnesia so many adults are no longer aware of our own cultural heritage. We forget to respect our elders and fail to inherit the musical soundtrack of their lives. Further impediments to both respecting older music and creating new include onerous performing arts licensing requirements and hassling of small restaurant music venues for large fees by  performing rights bureacracies like BMI, ASCAP and SESAC. (These organizations supposedly help songwriters get royalties when their work is performed, but what part of these royalties ever go to blues men and women, as opposed to major pop writers and singers?)

Despite these barriers, today’s kids are resilient, curious and open to anything that’s fun. When our traveling blues workshop, Chicago School of Blues, www.chicagoschoolofblues.org , shows a grade school class how to make up and sing a blues tune, they’ll catch the groove and throw in some rap rhymes. One South Side youngster observed, “This music is relaxing.” A seventh grader said, “I learned how to walk away from my problem and that blues can cool me down.” Starved for adult role models and relief from relentless standardized testing, the kids cheer when local professional blues men and women come to play.

In addition to the overall American neglect of history and the arts, there’s a racial dimension.  The natural progression of music being handed down in African American families and neighborhoods has been interrupted. And while some promoters in the majority European-American culture prize Black music, they don’t respect the people who are its creators. Disrespect and greed have led to the music ripoffs that nobody wants to talk about, but we must try to understand. I will address this history in the next column.