Music Greats To Kick Of "Year of the Blues"

[LS]

Music Greats Plan NYC "Salute To The Blues"

B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Mavis Staples are among the artists who will gather Feb. 7 at New York's Radio City Music Hall for a "Salute to the Blues." Produced by the Experience Music Project (EMP) and its founder Paul Allen's company, Vulcan, the historic concert will be filmed by director Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") for a theatrical release that will be executive produced by Martin Scorsese.

Others slated to perform are Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, Keb' Mo, Dr. John, David Johansen, Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Gregg Allman, and Chuck D (Public Enemy). More participants will be announced in the weeks leading up to the event, which will serve as the kickoff event for what Congress has declared the Year of the Blues.

Tickets for the concert -- ranging from $50 to $1,250 -- go on sale Friday (Jan. 10) at 10 a.m. ET via Ticketmaster, and the following day at the Radio City Music Hall box office. Net proceeds will benefit the Blues Music Foundation, a non-profit international organization dedicated to the preservation of blues history, the support of music education, and the provision of financial assistance to needy and worthy individuals who have made contributions to the genre.

As previously reported, Scorsese will produce a seven-part series titled "The Blues" to air this fall on PBS. The seven segments will be directed by Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce, and Wim Wenders. Sony Music and Universal Music Enterprises will collaborate to produce a CD box set, a DVD set, a "best of" CD, and seven individual soundtrack CDs with each segment director selecting their own track list. HarperCollins will publish a companion book to the series.

For more information on the history of the genre and events set to celebrate it, visit the EMP's Year of the Blues Web site at: www.yearoftheblues.org/

-- Barry A. Jeckell, N.Y.

[SweetNadine]

WooHoo! I was hoping this was going to be taped then I went back to read the article again. I am so glad this show will be taped for theatrical release.

Thanks for the this info and the website address LittleSister. I got it bookmarked.

[LS]

Movies, DVDs, box sets, CDs, books...I've already got this year's Christmas list started. ;D

Really nice site, I've only had a little time to poke around a little bit- but they've done a really good job from what I saw. Gotta go back and really spend some quality time checking it out.

[SweetNadine]

I want to get this book I read about in the new Blues Revue.

The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews From Living Blues Magazine edited by Jim O'Neal and Amy Van Singel. The book is published by Routledge.

The book contains a dozen groundbreaking conversations with blues heroes ranging from T-Bone Walker to Freddie King to the only published Q&A interview with Little Walter.

I need to pick-up some more bookmarks the next time I get to the store. ;D ;D Boy, I'm lovin' every minute of it. ;D ;D

[LS]

SweetNadine said:

I want to get this book I read about in the new Blues Revue.

The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews From Living Blues Magazine edited by Jim O'Neal and Amy Van Singel. The book is published by Routledge.

The book contains a dozen groundbreaking conversations with blues heroes ranging from T-Bone Walker to Freddie King to the only published Q&A interview with Little Walter.

I need to pick-up some more bookmarks the next time I get to the store. ;D ;D Boy, I'm lovin' every minute of it. ;D ;D

LOL Alice, and the year's just starting!! ;D

Actually, good as Blues Revue is, Living Blues is my favorite...they just seem to cover all the older guys and lesser known guys better.

[LS]

More Artists Line Up To Salute The Blues

India.Arie, John Fogerty, Solomon Burke, Natalie Cole, Levon Helm, and Alison Krauss are among the newly confirmed artists flocking to the Feb. 7 Salute to the Blues concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

The event, which will kick of what congress has dubbed "the year of the blues," will also feature newly added performers Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, the Neville Brothers, Ruth Brown, Odetta, Angie Stone, Jimmie Vaughan, Kim Wilson, Warren Haynes, Billy Boy Arnold, Honeyboy Edwards, Larry Johnson, Angelique Kidjo, Chris Thomas King, Lazy Lester, Hubert Sumlin, and James Blood Ulmer.

[SweetNadine]

Boy, this salute to the Blues keeps getting sweeter.

I can't wait to see this.

[LS]

The Rebirth Of The Blues
A concert filled with pop stars is part of a drive for new fans
By ISAAC GUZMAN
DAILY NEWS FEATURE WRITER

Late one night in 1903, a musician named W.C. Handy was standing on a railway platform in Tutwiler, Miss., when he heard a beguiling sound. A man was singing in a low moan and playing his guitar with a knife pressed against the strings, creating what Handy later described as "the weirdest music I'd ever heard."
The man was playing the blues with a primitive form of slide guitar.

Handy resolved right then to popularize the style - he went on to write the famous "St. Louis Blues" - but he had no idea that the sound of the rural Delta would become one of the greatest influences on popular music.

Friday night at Radio City, the organizers of the "Salute to the Blues" concert hope to foster another century of interest. The concert will match stars such as Aerosmith, India.Arie, Macy Gray and Bonnie Raitt with celebrated blues artists including B.B. King, Shemekia Copeland, Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown and James (Blood) Ulmer.

"There's going to be a lot of tremendous pairings of old and new," says producer Alex Gibney. "We're putting together the roots and the fruits. It'll start in Africa, move up the Mississippi to Chicago, to Great Britain and all around the world."

The concert, a benefit for the Blues Music Foundation - a group aiding music preservation and education, among other goals - is sold out except for $1,250 orchestra seats. But director Anton Fuqua ("Training Day," "Bait") will tape the show for PBS, which will air it in the fall along with seven blues-related movies by filmmakers including Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders and Mike Figgis.

A BIG YEAR FOR BLUES

That's just a part of a year-long blues blitz - concerts, educational forums and other events - organized in part by Martin Scorsese, who has extended his passion for film preservation and history to the blues.

The attention, according to the music's aficionados, is long overdue.

Like jazz, the blues has become something of a rarified form, replete with preservation societies and tempestuous arguments, but only a trickle of new fans. In the last decade, many blues artists have struggled to find clubs to play and labels to release their music.

"You've got people who have won Handy Awards [the blues equivalent of Grammys] who are having a hard time keeping themselves on the road or keeping their record contract," says Bob Putignano, president of the New York Blues and Jazz Society. "And a lot of the labels have decided to either go out of business or not put out just blues anymore."

Some performers think that's because blues purists have created an unofficial set of standards on which they judge all newcomers.

That notion of the "real blues" has become a straitjacket, these musicians claim.

"You have a select group of people who are involved in the blues and who hold on to the real traditional blues tightly," says Harlem-born Copeland, 23, daughter of Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland.

"That kind of stops the artists from doing anything new, and that's not a good thing. Because you're afraid that the people who love the blues will say that it's not bluesy enough," she adds.

Copeland has been celebrated as one of the genre's bright new artists because, she says, she has refused to sing the typical "'my baby done left me' songs."

She still hasn't learned who she'll be performing with on Friday, but she sings two songs by J.B. Lenoir in Wenders' documentary "The Soul of a Man," one of the films to be shown on PBS.

In the film, Wenders ("Buena Vista Social Club") also deals with the lives and careers of Skip James and Blind Willie Johnson, using their recordings and covers of their songs by current musicians including Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Nick Cave, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cassandra Wilson and Los Lobos.

[LS]

SOMETHING BORROWED...

The producers have been secretive about the details of Friday night's show, but Gibney says the audience can look forward to a pairing of bluegrass star Alison Krauss with experimental bluesman Ulmer.

Like the melding of pop and blues that brought Raitt new fame with the 1989 album "Nick of Time," that kind of cross-pollination might prove to be essential.

"The blues needs more of a crossover shot in the arm," says Putignano, who also presents a blues-oriented radio show on WFDU (89.1 FM). "People are getting dull on it, because it hasn't evolved. There's got to be more fresh ideas brought to the fray."

The producers, filmmakers and musicians hope that "The Blues" might replicate the surprising success of the old-time folk music from the soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" They believe that if people get a chance to feel the blues' visceral power, they'll be hooked.

"The blues is not played on MTV and it's not on VH1 or any of those stations, and it's hardly on the radio," Copeland says. "So this'll just put it in people's faces. And the blues is definitely not over. When Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and Albert King died, then you had people like my father and Lonnie Brooks and Gatemouth Brown and all of these other cats playing. So it will go on."

www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/56948p-53328c.html

[SweetNadine]

This show gets more exciting as time goes by. I will be scouring the internet for news articles on Saturday! ;D

[LS]

All the 'affordable' seats were gone in like 15 minutes...I tried so hard, but just couldn't snag a ticket.
(Can anybody lend LS $1200 bucks?? )

I might just go to hang around outside, maybe I'll be able to hear something from the street ...and it'd be worth it just to see all of them coming and going ...though don't know how close I'd get with all the blasted 'security' these days...

[SweetNadine]

LittleSister, did you make to the show last night?

[LS]

SweetNadine said:

LittleSister, did you make to the show last night?

;D ;D ;D Better...