July Blainletter

It's Hot Out There | Meeting Roy Hargrove | The Blues is Hurting | Out and About

(If you’re reading this at 5pm Tues, Jeff Tweedy is on live on his Substack. He’s an interesting cat. Watch for some live Blaincasts this summer)

Greetings to my cherished Blainreaders. It’s been a month since my last post and here I am with another substack blog and I have to take my hat off to Bill King who posts pretty well daily on his Substack, the Sound and Reason. I urge you to subscribe even though you’ll never be able to keep up. This week he was talking about jazz musician Roy Hargrove and included an interview he did with him. If you don’t recognize that name, read Bill’s post. Roy was a “rockstar” who shot to the stratosphere of the jazz world and flamed out just as quickly. And though he was as suave and handsome as any jazzman that ever lived everybody knew his name before they even knew what he looked like, That included yours truly and I had an embarrassing moment back when I worked at the Toronto Jazz Festival as their editor/IT/web guy. In the late 90s, The Rex Hotel hosted an after-hours jam session and it was just steps away from the main stage at Nathan Phillips Square and one year we convinced them to dedicate a couple of nights to blues and I was the host. That was back in the days when jazz festivals presented a healthy component of blues with lots of blues greats coming to town and I had hoped maybe our jam would follow one of the blues headliners but alas it was not to be - it was an Afro-Cuban thing and it was probably the only mainstage show I did not attend because I was at the Rex setting up for our jam, which would begin right after the show ended in the Marquis tent.

As I was setting up, this young, very nervous, black guy wandered in and was pacing in and out of the club and then walked up on stage and started noodling on the piano. I resisted saying anything but when we were about ready to start, I went up to him and asked if he was going to be jamming and was there anyone he particularly wanted to play with. He said yeah and I said “what’s your name?” He said “Roy” and the guy next to him said “ask him what his last name is?” And then I knew. It was Roy Hargrove. The hottest act on the jazz scene at that time. We started up, just playing my usual blues repertoire, and he would meander up to the stage, take an amazing solo and then float off the stage, sometimes right out the door onto Queen Street. He had brought along a couple of his bandmates, guitarist Russel Malone and sax man Antonio Hart. Malone sat in for a bit on a borrowed Strat, not sure if Antonio played, but there were also some local jazzers in the wings anxious to jam with these legends. At a certain point I said something like “we’ve got some serious jazz players in the house so I think we’ll hand it over…” but I look over to Roy and he’s making guitar strumming motions like he wants to keep playing blues. He was fine with playing twelve-bar blues all night long. I noticed that Robi Botos, a hot new player on the local scene, had slipped onto the piano bench and I went ahead and announced a Ray Charles tune. Then I see Robi slip back off the stage. Who doesn’t want to play a Ray Charles tune? Can’t remember if Robi ultimately got to jam with Roy but I do remember that he is one of the only two musicians who have declined to jam with Brian Blain over my entire career. Roy was on and off that stage all night long and as we were loading out he was still there sitting at a table with a couple of enraptured female fans. Like I said, he was a Rockstar!

The Blues is Hurting

I am posting this dispatch following two weeks of torture. Well maybe a bad sunburn does not qualify as torture but it shut me down good. Tonight I picked up the guitar for the first time in those two weeks - I’m playing along with Holger Petersen’s blues show just to see if my fingers are going where I want. Playing along with the radio is something I never did. And the only time I ever played along with tapes was when I was in a cover band and had to learn some parts. And it was no small feat trying to figure out the bass part while listening on a tiny speaker of my cassette player.

We’re now in our second hot spell in Toronto. Some friends from the south would say this is fine weather and I have said many times that it will have to be scorching hot to get me into a pool. I thought today would be the day but I just sent my regrets for a lovely poolside jam at my friend David Hines’ that I have attended many times but I knew it would not be a good idea as I’m here nursing a nasty sunburn from Sunday’s Toronto Blues Society Talent Search at the Toronto Jazz Festival. Check out my video compilation right here:

If “Blues is Hurting” rings a bell for any of my fans and followers, it 's the title of a tune on one of my early CD's – which was also included in a compilation CD celebrating the 20^th Anniversary of the Toronto Blues Society. You can hear me playing it live at the Silver Dollar a few years back (check out Pat Carey’s ripping sax solo) HERE.

The song was a litany of complaints, “...my favourite club is closing, CD sales are down and to get a decent paying gig, you’ve got to drive way out of town”. That was 20 years ago but it seems like we’re in another downturn.

When I tuned in to CIUT on Saturday to hear my favourite blues show, Calling All Blues, it was replaced by a rock show with a demented host (just like the old days). I listened for a while but I was missing the show - and was still reeling from Sugar Brown’s announcement the week before that he would no longer be hosting his segment. Apparently it will be continuing on Tuesday nights so I’m going to put that on my calendar. Last weekI was informed there was no longer a Blues Stage at the Montreal Jazz Festival and then later that night listening to one of my favourite blues radio shows, Blues Bar Café on the French CBC, Ici-Musique, they announced that the next week was to be their last show of the season and that they will not be returning next season. Merde! This was my go-to show for blues discovery, going back to Pierre Therrien and the legendary Dan "Bananaman" Behrman.

And now it's the 40^th Anniversary of the Toronto Blues Society and the society is undergoing a big transformation. A changing of the guard, as it were. There will be a new logo and a new "tagline" and at a recent meeting someone had suggested "Keeping the Blues Alive" had a bit of a negative connotation and I piped up that it was probably appropriate because it was starting to feel like the blues is on life-support. And it's because the blues audience is an older demographic and they're dying off, or at least they're not getting out as much and they are certainly not drinking as much beer as they used to.

If you're up on the history of the Toronto Blues Society you will know that it was created in 1985 when the blues scene in Toronto was a bit anemic so a promoter (Derek Andrews) and a couple of radio guys (John Valenteyn and David Barnard") decided they needed to give it a shot in the arm by producing some events and printing a monthly newsletter, which I have been editing since the early 90s. And sure enough, the scene did get a second wind, but there was always somebody grumbling about this or that and it has continued to this day, resulting in a new regime and new term limits on how long someone can sit on the Board of Directors. Right at the start, one of the most popular blues DJs in town, Eddy B, wanted to create a competing blues society and started his own blues newsletter. And there was Andy somebody out west who put out a great blues magazine called Real Blues but had a big chip on his shoulder about the TBS. There have always been musicians who wondered out loud why someone else got the gig or the nomination but when the people who hand out the grants start thinking there's something wrong with an organization that promotes black music being run by a bunch of old white guys, that does not bode well for the blues.

Folks who read my blog regularly will have surely seen my rants about how there's no black audience for the blues – not up here in Canada, anyway. I cannot speak for the rest of the world but I must say that I watch a lot of YouTube clips from blues festivals in the U.S. and beyond, and when the camera pans across the crowd, it's damn near all white. Not brown, not Asian, not Hispanic, not indigenous, and sad to say, not black. It's all white folks, and mostly old white folks. Old white folks who are indeed trying to keep the blues alive.

The Toronto Blues Society just celebrated their 40^th Anniversary and as the long standing editor of the newsletter I was invited to perform (instead of just writing about it). Well it was nice to be invited but remind me next time I'm invited to play a birthday party to bring a band. It was not a listening crowd, and anyone trying to make out my lyrics would be hard pressed to hear them over the din of the crowd as you will hear in the video below.

I've always thought my laid-back story-telling blues had a place in the blues landscape but not much in the blues scene that I inhabit. I'm remembering over the many years I've been involved in the planning of TBS birthday parties that it was always “de rigueur” to get a band who would pack the dance floor. But as we watch the demographic of the blues audience reach retirement age, there seems to be less dancing. So there wasn't much dancing at the 40^th but I can't say it was a concert crowd either.

At one time, in the early days of radio and records, blues was pop music. Then it went electric and every blues club had a packed dance floor. Then for a while the blues went away as it periodically does and came back in the 60s as folk music, and was embraced by a whole new audience of mostly white college kids who went to folk festivals and got to see a lot of old black bluesmen who were brought back into the music world by blues aficionados like Alan Lomax and Dick Waterman. And in recent years we had some artists like Bonnie Raitt, Gary Clark Jr and Tedeschi-Trucks crossing over. But looking at those names, 3 out of 4 are white. Somewhere along the line, blues stopped being black music. And the black audience, by and large, turned their back on the blues – for whatever reason, it was their grandpa's music, old hat…a bit too repetitive.

And it seems the same things that turned some people away from the blues is what attracted others, and they were mostly white folk. Jodie Drake said it best, "you either feel it or you don't" and it's got nothing to do with the colour of your skin.

Then there's so many kinds of blues and if somebody likes one kind of blues they might not like the other. Blues is the most democratic music you can find because just about anybody can play it. Most guitar players started out learning blues tunes unless they were getting some kind of formal blues education. And a lot of them would eschew the blues once they moved on to jazz or pop. Too simplistic. But that's what made it so accessible. Three chords and the truth. Oh, that's what they say about country music. Well, let's call it Three chords and the groove.

Is there a more confused music genre than the blues? I just watched a just-released Hollywood movie called "Sinners" which has a blues singer as the protagonist and even has a cameo appearance from Buddy Guy. It will probably be a big hit (it has zombies). Maybe this signals another bump in the blues in the mainstream media. It seems to come and go in all the years that I've been part of the blues scene. When I got to Toronto, the city was peppered with blues clubs and blues jams and big shows with blues stars not to mention blues festivals galore. And there was always a bit-o-blues in any festival you could find whether they called themselves roots or folk or jazz. This week there's a couple of big festivals kicking off, Luminato and NXNE and neither has a hint of blues. Then there will be the Toronto Jazz Festival which had a tradition of kicking off the festival with a big-name blues artist and would have other blues in the course of the week. Not so much anymore, but they did have Mavis Staples so thank you Lord.

Out and About

Speaking of the marvelous Mavis, and the declining audience for blues, I was pretty shocked to discover the venue was changed at the last minute from the 1500-seat Elgin Theatre to the 900-seat Wintergarden. Further confirmation that the blues is indeed hurting. It was a beautiful show - she’s not jumping around like she used to but there was plenty of soul and even a bit of testifying. She even had her “chef d'orchestre" Rick Holmstrom do the vocal on one of her hits. He did a lot more background singing than he did the last time I saw them. I was also surprised about the directive for “no recording”. I’ve recorded clips at other shows of hers but maybe the thinking is that when an artist is coming to the end of their touring days you don’t want people posting anything that might reveal an artist in decline. Well, not to fear, there was no decline from Mavis, though she sat down for some tunes. Meanwhile, I saw Sue Foley doing her one-woman show at the Aurora Performing Arts Centre where the audience was invited to record. Last time I was there (Kenny Blues Boss Wayne) there was a very stern announcement for no recording. Oh well, I go with the flow. Here a bit of Sue (she didn‘t pick up her electric until the encore!)

PS: Since then, she’s received a bunch more awards and accolades (the cover of Living Blues!) and they just keep coming. After the show, I went up to the stage to see if she had a pedal on that Princeton amp and was surprised to see her guitar tech/road manager was Big Ben Richardson - a stalwart of the Toronto music scene until he moved to Austin 16 years ago.

PPS: I was wearing an Austin Blues Society T-Shirt that someone gave me and Ben and Sue looked at each other and said “Never heard of the Austin Blues Society” (they both live in Austin). So maybe there was one a long time ago, but need I repeat…the blues is hurting. Even where you expect it to be thriving.

And here’s a little bit of Toronto blues history. The Original Sloth Band (The Whiteley Brothers and friends when they were young teenagers) had a reunion concert to celebrate their 60th anniversary! It was a delight to be there. I was transported way back to before I ever got to Toronto. Here’s a taste of that (with the next-generation Whiteley, Jesse, sitting in on piano).

I leave you with the last showI saw last month - the inimitable Jack de Keyzer raising the roof at the Redwood. I always say about Jack that he couldn’t hit a bad note if he tried. My drummer-of-choice, Michelle Josef, used to say the same thing about David Wilcox who she played with for many years, back when she was Bodahn. I had never even heard of Wilcox when I got to Toronto, then I got to hear him once or twice. Never met him, but he literally blew me off the stage a couple of years back at the Kitchener Blues Festival. I was playing on one of the smaller stages but when he hit the main stage it was louder than me - and I was a long ways from the main stage. He is loud - and still going strong. Good on him! No, I don’t have a clip of him, but here’s a bit of Jack:

To my doubly-cherished Paid Subscribers, I am once again begging your indulgence for my delayed update on The Magic Pick, my 70s rock musical that is being revived (I’ve got a defibrulator standing by). I promised I would be putting up some (maybe all) the music as I prepare to take it to the next level and get some tracks that I can use to start auditioning some singers but alas, this sunburn thing knocked me out for the last three weeks, just when I was getting to a comfort zone with those tunes (now whittled down to 23 - from 29). I’m going to have to start over, but looking on the bright side, I will probably have a fresh outlook and they will come out even better. Do not abandon hope. And speaking of abandonment, I guess it’s been a year since I launched the Substack and it has come to my attention (shockingly) that Substack will automatically renew your subscription at the end of a year. Apparently they send out a notice, but one of my early adopters was taken by surprise when another $50 was taken off his credit card, so although I hope with all my heart that you will stick with me for another year, please keep an eye out for that renewal notice.

And here’s my quote of the day (quite a-propos since there’s been a couple of occasions lately where I’ve laid my weary self down and wondered if I would be getting back up)

Quote of the Day

“An awareness of death enables us to live each day each moment — filled with appreciation for the unique opportunity we have to create something of our time on Earth. I believe that in order to enjoy true happiness, we should live each moment as if it were our last. Today will never return. We may speak of the past or of the future, but the only reality we have is that of this present instant. And confronting the reality of death actually enables us to bring unlimited creativity, courage, and joy into each instant of our lives”. - Daisaku Ikeda

Feel free to forward this to any friend you think might enjoy my occasional ramblings (and maybe my music, too). The archives (going back to 1990) are available at www.torontobluesdiary.blogspot.com

See you out there, eventually.

BrianB, aka Butch, Nappy, Shaker, Two-Lane Blain, Colorblind Brian, Stringbuster, Buddha of the Blues