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Vocapedia > Arts > Music > Blues

jump blues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Witherspoon

rhythm and blues USA

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/
arts/music/linda-hopkins-died-gospel-singer-on-broadway.html

blues USA

https://www.pbs.org/theblues/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/
arts/music/dick-waterman-dead.html

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/13/
1175529791/mississippi-parchman-prison-farm-blues

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/13/
1161371343/mississippi-delta-home-blues-civil-rights

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/
opinion/sunday/crazy-blues-mamie-smith.html

https://www.npr.org/2008/07/02/
92123120/jimmy-witherspoon-shouting-the-blues

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/05/
575422226/forebears-bessie-smith-the-empress-of-the-blues

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/
honoring-blues-and-roots-musicians-in-tintypes/

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/27/
530398231/the-ramblin-blues-of-gregg-allman

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/
arts/music/linda-hopkins-died-gospel-singer-on-broadway.html

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/03/
427728963/buddy-guy-i-worry-about-the-future-of-blues-music

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/
arts/music/samuel-charters-foundational-scholar-of-the-blues-dies-at-85.html

https://www.npr.org/2015/01/31/
382701847/in-a-few-fateful-years-one-record-label-blew-open-the-blues

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=5357441 - April 22, 2006

Mississippi Delta > Delta blues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Delta_blues

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/
documenting-the-blues-in-the-mississippi-delta/

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/05/
106364432/mississippi-delta-blues-american-cornerstone

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jan/14/
jazz.music

Chicago, Illinois > Chicago blues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_blues

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/30/
arts/willie-dixon-musician-76-dies-singer-and-writer-of-classic-blues.html

Memphis > Memphis blues USA

http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2011/06/16/
137151334/oh-mama-a-tale-of-two-cities-memphis-blues

bluesman USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/
arts/music/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.html

The Blues

anchors a multi-media celebration

that raises awareness of the blues

and its contribution to American culture

and music worldwide.

Under the guiding vision

of Executive Producer Martin Scorsese,

seven directors will explore the blues

through their own personal

styles and perspectives.

The films in the series

are motivated by a central theme:

how the blues evolved

from parochial folk tunes

to a universal language.

http://www.pbs.org/theblues/ - broken link

There was a time, (...),

when Baton Rouge was not only

the blues capital of Louisiana

but also one of the busiest blues hubs

in the entire United States. USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/
travel/in-baton-rouge-theyre-still-singing-the-blues.html

bluesman UK

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/apr/03/
muddy-waters-happy-100th-birthday-john-moore

Robert Wyatt UK

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/oct/18/
jazz.urban

WC Handy

'A lean, loose-jointed Negro

had commenced plunking a guitar

beside me while I slept.

His clothes were rags,

his feet peeped out of his shoes.

His face had on it

some of the sadness of the ages.

As he played,

he pressed a knife

on the strings of the guitar

in a manner popularised

by Hawaiian guitarists

who used steel bars.

The effect was unforgettable.

His song too, struck me instantly.

"Goin' to where the Southern cross the dog."

The singer repeated the line three times,

accompanying himself on the guitar

with the weirdest music I had ever heard.'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jan/14/jazz.music

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jan/14/
jazz.music

the 12-bar blues

slide

glass bottleneck

slide / bottleneck guitar

pitch

From left,

Phil Chess, Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Bo Diddley.

Chess Records, the independent label Mr. Chess co-founded,

was known for recruiting black singers

who had migrated from the South.

Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

Phil Chess,

Whose Record Label Elevated Unknown Blues Musicians,

Dies at 95

NYT

October 19, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/
arts/music/phil-chess-dead.html

blues record label > Chess Records

Chess Records

was one of the most prominent

of the independent labels

— Atlantic in New York

and Sun in Memphis

were among the others —

that became successful in the 1950s

by finding little-known performers,

recording them

and persuading radio stations

(not infrequently

with the help of cash payments)

to play their records.

Their goal was profit,

but their lasting influence was suggested

by the first ballot

of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,

which consisted almost entirely of artists

who had recorded for independent labels.

Chess Records was best known

for recruiting black musicians

who had taken their heartbreak,

hopes and not a few harmonicas from the South

to Chicago and who,

with electric guitars and a big backbeat,

gave birth to what came to be known

as Chicago blues.

In addition to Muddy Waters,

its roster included, at various times,

Howlin’ Wolf,

Little Walter,

Sonny Boy Williamson

and many other Chicago blues stars.

The Chicago-based label

released blues records

which helped define rock’n’roll,

proving hugely influential to musicians

like the Rolling Stones

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/19/
phil-chess-dies-chess-records

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Chess_Records

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/
arts/music/charles-stepney-step-on-step.html

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/20/
phil-chess-records-chicago-south-side-blues

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/
arts/music/phil-chess-dead.html

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/19/
498579284/phil-chess-co-founder-of-chess-records-
dies-at-95

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/19/
phil-chess-dies-chess-records

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/nov/06/
leonard-phil-marshall-chess-records

https://www.npr.org/2008/12/05/
97869757/a-hollywood-makeover-for-chess-records

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/24/
label-love-chess-records

https://www.npr.org/2000/08/06/
1080392/chess-records

blues record labels

The story of Paramount Records

is a story of contradictions.

It was a record label

founded by a furniture company,

a commercial enterprise

that became arguably

the most comprehensive chronicler

of African American music

in the early 20th century.

And yet, for Paramount's executives,

music was an afterthought.

https://www.npr.org/2015/01/31/
382701847/in-a-few-fateful-years-one-record-label-blew-open-the-blues

indie jazz and blues label Delmark Records >

Bob Koester 1932-2021

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/15/
997105714/remembering-delmark-records-founder-bob-koester

Dick Waterman 1935-2024

Promoter and Photographer of the Blues, Dies at 88

A “crackpot eccentric Yankee” from Massachusetts,

he revived the careers of long-forgotten Southern artists

during the blues boom of the 1960s.

Dick Waterman

(...)

as a promoter, talent manager and photographer

helped revive the careers of a generation

of storied purveyors of that bedrock American art form

while lyrically documenting their journeys with his camera

(...)

Through his company, Avalon Productions,

which was considered the first management and booking agency

devoted primarily to Black blues artists,

Mr. Waterman provided overdue exposure — and income —

to early blues luminaries like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House

and Skip James.

He also shepherded

the careers of a younger blues cohort,

including Buddy Guy and Otis Rush,

as well as one young white artist,

the singer-songwriter

and future Grammy Award winner Bonnie Raitt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/
arts/music/dick-waterman-dead.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Dick_Waterman

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/
arts/music/dick-waterman-dead.html

Corpus of news articles

Arts > Music > Blues

Saxophonist Johnny Griffin

Dies at 80

July 26, 2008

The New York Times

By BEN RATLIFF

Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.

And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time he was also having marital and tax troubles) , he left for Holland.

At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out of sync with the times.

“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything any more,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”

Indeed his work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.

Mr. Griffin grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, who also taught the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: At the age of 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway ballroom, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14, he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the guitarist T-Bone Walker.

At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, switching to tenor saxophone. From then until 1951, he was mostly on the road, though based in New York City. By 1947 he was touring with Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan who ran a rhythm-and-blues band, and with Morris he made his first recordings for the Atlantic record label. He entered the army in 1951, was stationed in Hawaii, and played in an army band.

Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became a force in jazz. He heard both with the Billy Eckstine band in 1945; having first internalized the more ballad-like saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, he was now entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of the new music, bebop. In general, his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.

Beyond the 1960s, his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.

Starting in the late 1940s, he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his army service, he went back to Chicago and started playing with Monk, a move that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet back in New York in the late ‘50s; later, in 1967, he played with Monk’s touring eight- and nine-person groups.

In 1957, Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint, and in 1958 started making his own records for the Riverside label. On a series of recordings, including “Way Out” and “The Little Giant,” his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun: on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles to test a musician’s mettle, he was simply blazing.

A few years later he hooked up with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, and made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to either find them thrilling or filled with too many notes, especially on Monk tunes. The matchup with Davis was a popular one, and they would sporadically reunite through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In 1963 he left the United States, eventually settling in Paris and recording thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates like Kenny Clarke, sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, in the Netherlands; in the early 80s he moved to Poitiers, in southwestern France.

With his American quartet — including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington — he stayed true to the bebop small-group ideal, and the 1991 record he made with the group for the Antilles label, called “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.

Every April he returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, and usually spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York before returning home to his quiet countryside chateau.