Jun 08, 2026
Lydia Liebman has sent a mass email with the information that the singular guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer transitioned on June 3. Lydia attached an obituary from the Ulmer family, which I’ve pasted below. It’s followed by a profile that I wrote about Mr. Ulmer in 2007, framed around the release of Bad Blood In The City.
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James Blood Ulmer
February 8, 1940 – June 3, 2026
With deep sorrow and profound love, we announce the passing of James Blood Ulmer, a boldly innovative guitarist, singer, composer, and beloved family member. James died peacefully on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, at the age of 86.
Born on February 8, 1940, the eldest of eight children, Blood grew up in rural, deeply segregated St. Matthews, South Carolina. His father, a Baptist preacher, gave him his first guitar when he was four years old. Raised on church music, James’s first professional gig was singing gospel with his father’s vocal quartet, the Southern Sons. When his voice changed, he turned to the guitar and found inspiration in Chuck Berry and the blues — music his god-fearing parents condemned as “devil’s music.”
After graduating from high school, James left home at eighteen and migrated north to Pittsburgh, where he married, had two children, Greg and Donna, and found work accompanying doo-wop groups like the Del Vikings on guitar. He soon began touring throughout the United States and performing in Europe.
Following his time in Pittsburgh, James moved to Columbus, Ohio — a surprisingly strong jazz town that boasts local heroes Art Tatum and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He later relocated to Detroit, where his third child, Michael, was born. For the next five years, James stayed off the road and taught music while playing local clubs with drummer Doug Hammond in Focus Novii. After receiving the cold shoulder from his hero, Wes Montgomery, Blood began developing his own musical language, determined to sound like no one else.
In 1971, James moved once again, this time to New York, where his guitar caught the ear of legendary avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He soon joined Coleman’s harmolodic funk band, Prime Time.
Among Blood’s discography of over 25 genre-bending albums are his milestone records: 1980’s Are You Glad to Be in America? (which featured Blood’s classic song which asked his listeners the quintessential question) Free Lancing (1981), Black Rock (1982), and Odyssey (1983). More recently James returned to singing roots music with Memphis Blood in 2001 and Bad Blood in the City, which was nominated for a Grammy in 2007.
The late music critic Greg Tate once described James as “the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and [his favorite guitarist] Wes Montgomery on one hand, and P-Funk and Mississippi Fred McDowell on the other.”
Following Blood’s final concert at the Detroit Jazz Festival on September 1, 2024, his health began to decline, and he entered a quieter season away from the road and the stage.
Beyond his lifelong dedication to music, Blood was a father to six children: Greg, Donna, Michael, Gia, Damu and Nisa. He was also the proud grandfather of twelve grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren.
To the world, James Blood Ulmer was a legend, a visionary, and a musical force whose sound was distinctive and unique. To his family, he was their teacher, their storyteller, and a source of strength. To Eva, his wife and partner, James was her rock, her hero, and her beloved companion of sixteen years. His music was fearless, and so was his spirit.
A private funeral will be held on Monday June 8, 2026, There will be a public celebration of James’s life in the near future, so stay tuned. Please respect our privacy at this time and play Blood’s music LOUD!
The Family of James Blood Ulmer
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Directly below is the text of the profile that I wrote about James “Blood” Ulmer.
There follows the transcript of my full 90-minute interview with Mr. Ulmer.
[June 10th] I’ve added the transcript of my full phone interview with Vernon Reid, who produced Bad Blood In The City and the three blues albums that Blood Ulmer made after 2001.
“Blood’s Blues” – Jazziz, 2007
On Bad Blood In the City, a searing evocation of post-Katrina New Orleans, James “Blood” Ulmer sings five original blues responses to the catastrophe and covers a half-dozen additional blues songs that, as the native South Carolinian says, “sound like New Orleans already.” But considering the calamities that Ulmer experienced while cutting this music over 48 hours last December at New Orleans’ Piety Street Studios, it’s a touch surprising that he and producer Vernon Reid, the guitarist of Living Colour fame who has shaped Ulmer’s four blues-as-such albums for Hyena since 2001, didn’t opt to include the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cult classic “I Put a Spell on You.”
“I don’t really know what happened when I went down there,” Ulmer said at his SoHo loft in May. “I never had that happen before — go to do a job, then you lose your voice, and your instrument breaks, and there ain’t nothin’ else you can do. I had to wait till I got back to New York to overdub, and it took me a long time to get over the hoarseness. It wasn’t bad or good — it dealt with the true essence of making a blues record in New Orleans. We couldn’t go and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we made a record and everything went fine.’ No. The place wasn’t fine. There had to be obstacles to bring across the true nature of what blues is, to describe something that actually exists.”
Open except for a raised sleeping area in the northeast corner, Ulmer’s loft, which once housed a battery-acid factory, looks like lofts in Soho looked when artists lived and worked in them. It was twilight, mild, and drizzly, and the windows, which looked like remnants from 1975, when Ulmer moved in, were closed. Wearing a white undershirt, dark leather pants, and boots, Ulmer sat at a long wooden table, on which rested, among other things, a transliterated Koran, an enormous Webster’s dictionary, and a thick printout of his collected lyrics. Across the room, two luxe recliners, several guitars, a drum set, and a stationary bicycle sat near a monitor and an assortment of audio/video gear.
As Ulmer spoke, he spun imaginary lines with spidery, ropish fingers, striking the table to emphasize his phrases. (He’s 67, but you wouldn’t want to receive one of those blows.) Periodically, he glanced at the news stream from CNN, as he had on the day after the storm.
“I didn’t have no nightmare about it,” he said, recalling how he came to conjure “Survivors of the Hurricane,” “Katrina,” and “Old Slave Master,” all highlights of the new album. “None of these were my thoughts at all. I didn’t wake up with this music.Soledad O’Brien was in the lower Ninth Ward, and while the water was still rising, she was broadcasting how terrible it was that the levee had broke and all that water was coming in. And that water was a mess down there. But then after a little while had gone by, everyone was saying, ‘Katrina did it.’ Yeah, Katrina did something, but Katrina didn’t do everything. The levee broke. That’s what I was trying to bring out.
“The record is totally Vernon’s conception,” he added. “He chose the songs and the band, and made all of it sound like it was about New Orleans. It wasn’t just those songs that I wrote. I just did my job!”
“Blood has always been adamant that I take responsibility for what these records are,” says Reid, long an admirer of Ulmer’s singular “harmolodic” guitar approach that he developed on collaborations with Ornette Coleman during the first half of the ’70s then codified on some 20 recordings beginning with 1978’s Tales of Captain Black. Reid is equally enamored of the mumbly, raspy moan with which Ulmer, on many of those records, delivered anthemic tunes more connected to rock and funk conventions than to hard-core blues.
“I ran into Blood and said, ‘To me, you’re a blues singer; you should make a blues album.’ He was kind of gruff, never negative,” recalls Reid. “It became clear to me that he had an undiscovered blues voice, a raw voice that harks back to another era of blues.”
Having piqued Ulmer’s interest in exploring the blues side of his nature, Reid followed through with a pair of site-specific recordings on which Ulmer sang songs from the blues canon. Part 1 was 2001’s Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions, a paean to Southern roots recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis. Part 2 was 2003’s No Escape From the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions, a psychedelia-tinged session realized at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan. The process seemed to ignite sparks of existential inquiry in Ulmer, and in 2005 he released Birthright, a solo recital built around a suite of autobiographical songs that depict Ulmer’s origins as the gospel-singing son of a preacher during segregation times in St. Matthews, South Carolina, a hamlet some 40 miles west of Charleston. In St. Matthews, Ulmer recalls, “we didn’t have a movie house, didn’t have a bus station, the train didn’t stop, and the white folks had no houses for you to rent.” His parents imposed severe consequences if he was caught listening too closely to local guitarist-raconteurs Johnny Wilson and Alton Smith.
“They used to do what people call blues — sing about exactly what is happening with them right now and play the guitar as they sing the story,” said Ulmer. “But my family was into gospel, and that was our life. We didn’t worry about the blues. You can’t serve God and the Devil at the same time. If you’re going to try to go God, you go God. If you don’t care, you don’t care.”
“One night in Memphis,” Reid recalls, “we played ‘Little Red Rooster’ and were listening back to it. Blood became very somber. He said, ‘That’s the blues. That’s the music my mama never wanted me to play.’ It was a stunning revelation. Part of the reason why these records have a certain something is that they are born out of observations about something in his life. People don’t understand that Blood struggles with this. I wanted to record ‘Back Door Man’ for the first record, and he was absolutely adamant that he wasn’t going to do it. He said to me, ‘I have been that person.’”
Ulmer’s blues life began in 1959, when he moved north to Pittsburgh — the home of his grandfather, immortalized in the song “Geechee Joe” on Birthright — and quickly realized that he could earn more money working two or three gigs a week than working a regular job. “My Daddy didn’t send me to no school, and I didn’t apply for no student loan,” he said. “The steel mills was for men who had a lot of children and wives. I didn’t want to take no man’s job.” He laughs sardonically. “So I never even tried to go in the steel mills. My Daddy told me that he hoped I didn’t have to work as hard as he did. He said that to me very slowly. He said, ‘I hope … when you … get away and be on your own … that you do not … have to work … as hard as I do.’ And I told him, ‘Daddy, don’t worry about it. I won’t.’”
However conflicted Ulmer may have felt about singing the blues, his readings of “Back Door Man” and other blues songs have made him a force on the national roots-music circuit, as evidenced by a June booking at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. His version of “Sitting on Top of the World” (Mississippi Sheiks, circa 1930) with Alison Krauss is a highlight of the Martin Scorsese-produced 2005 DVD Lightning In a Bottle — billed as a “one-night history of the blues” — which features such luminaries as B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Dave “Honeyboy” Edwards, and Bonnie Raitt. But Ulmer warns that his four-record “reinvention” as a blues musician since his 60th birthday “don’t mean I’m a changed man.”
“If they give me about four or five billion dollars, I might change my concept,” he spat out with a wheezy laugh. “I’ve made 40 records, but people only want to talk about those four. I have been produced behind the record to sing — not to play the guitar. You know, even though they had slavery in America, everybody wasn’t no slave. I can’t change … simply because I don’t want to change.
“I like the movement of me going to the blues,” he continued. “It was like trying to say, ‘OK, I did my thing all my life without nobody messing with me and telling me what to do.’ Then somebody asked me to do something that had been done over and over again. I wanted to prove to myself that maybe I could do something that someone else had been doing.”
Ulmer lowered his fist, and raised it. “I went to school, I did the gospel, the rhythm-and-blues, the progressive jazz, the blues jazz, and avant-garde. And they said, ‘OK, you finished graduating; now here’s your test.’” The fist torqued down like a jackhammer. “‘Sing these motherfuckin’ 12 blues songs by Muddy Waters.’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll try that.’ So, did I pass? I think I’m passing. I don’t know whether I like the records or not. But I want this thing to be as successful as it can be, so I can move on to the next step, whether it’s forwards or backwards.”
Although Ulmer wouldn’t specify that next step, his remarks indicated a general direction. “I came onto the scene in New York as a guitar player, and I somehow feel that I have lost my belt to some of my other opponents,” he said, shaking his head and laughing again. “Now I want my guitar belt back!” He slammed the table in a triplet crescendo.
“When you play a solo on a song, you’re exposing your intellect. That level of concentration is more sophisticated than concentrating on a thing that don’t have much music to it. I swear, I cannot sing and play music at the same time. Singing is an art of its own. You don’t really need no music for blues. It’s a concept that exists, and to use that concept to tell stories in the blues is what the solo record was about. I really like playing blues solo, so I can get right to the point.”
Wherever the next step takes Ulmer, it will likely hew to the musical principles that Ornette Coleman described 30 years ago as harmolodic. The term remains in the lexicon, yet its definition remains murky. Ulmer offers as precise an encapsulation as anyone has done.
“I’m a follower,” he says. “I don’t make stands. I followed my Daddy, and I follow the prophets. The prophets are my idols, from Moses on down to Mohammed. I followed Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory, and I still follow it. I followed it so hard until I figured out that to actually follow the harmolodic system the best, I have to become a harmolodic person. We’ve got to keep each concept of music that was brought from Africa to this country alive, and never let no discrimination be on one or the other. All of them are equal. All of them have to exist. That’s harmolodic.”
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Interview with James Blood Ulmer (May 16, 2007):
TP: [AFTER HE SAID HE MAY NOT WANT TO DO HIS NEXT RECORD WITH HYENA] I suppose that label has framed you in a certain context, or elaborated something that had been part of what you did before…
ULMER: Do you think that’s good?
I don’t know. What do you think?
That’s the problem. I don’t know. I don’t have any… It’s hard to say what’s good and what’s bad. I know the main thing is… I think the most important thing is to promote the artist instead of a record. That’s my thought. I think it would be more profitable down the line to promote the artist. No matter how slow you might want to go, I think it might still be the best way in the end.
This article is for an issue about guitar players, so I’d like to ask you about playing guitar, and the blues and guitar, and the other musics that you blend into your concept… So let me jump on what you said and ask if, on these idiomatic blues records, you think differently about what you’re saying on the guitar vis-a-vis rehearsing with this band.
Different than the blues, you mean?
In terms of playing the guitar on these records for Hyena, are you thinking about it differently? Do you not play things that you would play in an instrumental situation?
Well, you can’t play and sing… I mean, you can accompany yourself while you’re singing with the instrument. You only can accompany yourself, because the words can become stronger than what you’re playing about. I mean, the music is going to have to accompany your voice if you’re singing, if you want your singing to be believed.
Does the guitar take an equal role to your voice on these records?
I don’t know how you can quite do that. Because I have been produced behind the record to sing. Not to play the guitar. [gi-tar]
On your records for the previous 20 years, you’d often sing 3 songs, play 4-5 instrumentals…
Yeah, I was more of a gi-tar player. I came onto the scene in New York as a guitar player, and somehow feel that I have lost my belt to some of my other opponents. [LAUGHS] Now, I want my gi-tar belt back! [SLAMS TABLE 3 TIMES] That’s about it. That’s all I can say. What can I say? I want my belt back.
Which category would it be?
Any category. I separate playing the music and singing. Because I swear, I cannot sing and play music at the same time. I think singing is an art of its own, and you have to leave it alone, or you can disturb it by trying to overpower it with something. You know, when somebody’s singing, you make a loud noise so you want to hear what they’re singing? You can do that with music, too.
Birthright, your solo guitar record, has a lot of originals. The two records before that were mostly covers. If I recollect correctly, you’d written most of the songs for Birthright within striking distance of making the record.
Yes, they were songs I wrote after I made the first blues record.
Before you made the first blues record, had you written many songs?
[TAKES OUT 200-PAGE BOOK] This book I just wrote. I have a book of all of the words that I have written for a song. And believe me, this much words I have written.
A couple of hundred pages…
Well, not really. But that’s every one.
“Are You Glad to Be In America” is song #1.
Yes.
When did you write that song? Directly before that record in 1981?
I don’t have the date and time…
Well, you recorded it in 1981.
I wrote that song in England maybe. You’re going way back.
Let’s talk about the guitar belts.
[LAUGHS] I said something you liked, the “guitar belt.” When I first started playing and made Glad to Be In America, I made a record for Columbia and stuff like that… It seemed like they kind of labeled me behind Ornette Coleman, harmolodic free-concept playing on the guitar. I don’t know. Maybe it was. Maybe I was free. So anyway, what I was talking about, that level of concentration of music is more sophisticated than concentrating on a thing that don’t have much music to it. Blues. You don’t really need no music for blues, really. You can put music on blues. But you don’t have to have music to get the blues. So blues is just like that, and that’s what I found out. Blues is a concept that exists, and anyone can put anything to the concept that they want. They can talk about themself, they can talk about a camera, they can talk about anything, but still remain in the concept. What’s so disheartening about the concept is that whoever created the blues concept didn’t get paid! And that’s a shame. [LAUGHS] They should have gotten paid for the concept. To use that concept to tell stories in the blues, that’s what the solo record was about. I really like playing blues solo, so I can get right to the point. You don’t need music for the blues, but you can put music to it.
How arranged is the new record?
The record is totally Vernon Reid’s conception. He choose the song, he choose the band. He’s what you call the producer, man, and they are really-really needed, and very-very necessary. He’s good. He created a concept from the music to make the record seem a certain kind of way, and evidently it’s working, because he produced it—and you are talking to me about the blues. Now, I wrote a song called “Let’s Talk about Jesus,” I wrote a song called “Katrina,” “Survivors of the Hurricane,” “Old Slave Master,” and “There’s Power in The Blues.”
The way you described it in the press material that accompanied the record is that the music came you in a rush…
I was watching TV, CNN. None of these were my thoughts at all. I mean, I didn’t have no nightmare or nothin’ about it, and woke up with this music. I was just watching this on the television, seemed like to me. “Survivors Of the Hurricane” wasn’t my song. It was from a story…
You were listening to people tell stories about it…
No-no-no. I was looking at it when it happened. Say, for instance, when Soledad was covering the news on CNN, she was in the Lower Ninth Ward after the storm, and while the water was actually still rising and stuff, she was broadcasting how terrible it was that the levee had broke and all that water was coming in, and that water was a mess down there. But then after a little while had gone by, everyone was saying “Katrina did it.” Katrina did it now! Just things like that was what I was trying to bring out. Yeah, Katrina did something, but Katrina didn’t do everything. You can’t blame the whole thing on Katrina.
I know Vernon picked the covers. But were they songs you knew before? Did you have a point of view on them before you went in the studio?
No. I have to like the story so I can… If I like the story, then I can make the song like I want to make it. I never have to hear who’s singing it. All I need to know is the story. I never listened to none of these brothers play these songs. I didn’t get a chance to really listen to who was singing the song before I sung it. Say, like, “Don’t You Mind People Grinning In Your Face.” Now, I don’t have to listen to nobody sing that! [LAUGHS] I don’t. I really don’t. I just don’t. In fact, if I listened to somebody singing it, it would mess me up.
Why is that?
Because I might have to follow them, because I’m a follower.
There’s a story you tell in this material about Wes Montgomery. In the ‘60s, I guess when you were in Columbus, playing with Hank Marr, you idolized Wes Montgomery. You said, “I imagined how he thought, how he felt…” Then you wound up in Indianapolis and Wes was there, and you were trying to impress him, then you went to the bar and he totally ignored you, and you said that you took that as a signal that you shouldn’t be imitating anybody…
Yeah, yeah. I took that very serious. It’s very serious. I didn’t want to invade his territory at all. I wanted to go somewhere totally different than he was. I didn’t even want to challenge it at all. Yeah, that’s true.
But when you say that you’re a follower, are you the type of follower who knows he’s a follower so you do everything you can in order to avoid being put into that situation?
Well, I say I’m a follower, because I know God created everything, and made everything. I’m not doin’ nothin’. I’m a follower. I follow the prophets. They are my idols. The prophets are my idols, from Moses on down to Mohammed. They are my idols, all of them. That’s who I follow. That’s why I say I’m a follower.
You said before you’d avoid listening to these singers because it might mess you up.
Well, I might try to find out how they’re singing it. So they might be singing it different. I don’t know. It happened to me… I was singing a song of Johnny Copeland, called “Ghetto Child.” And I listened to Johnny Copeland sing “Ghetto Child.” That brother can really sing! You know Johnny Copeland? Now, Johnny Copeland wasn’t no blues singer. He was a SINGER. He could sing. Now, when I heard that song he was singing, it’s so beautiful, I could never sing it like that, because I ain’t never… I didn’t look at singing that way. So I said, “I want to try to sing it like it’s a blues,” and that’s the only way I could have made it through that song. But I’d never listened to him singing it, I would have had to make a decision. I could have just gone ahead and maybe… I don’t know what I would have done.
Do you remember when you first sang the blues? I know as a kid you sang in a gospel quartet.
You’re confusing me. When you say did I sing a blues…
You said Johnny Copeland’s not a blues singer, he’s a SINGER…
Well, I’ll take that back, because I don’t really know much about that concept. But when I heard him… I was trying to give me an example how it affected me when I heard that record. He was so smooth. It was like riding on a carpet. To me, he was somebody that I could honestly… If I have a song, I’d say I’ll stay with his record for three-four more years, and I might not make it, because I know you have to spend a million hours in before you can call yourself a pro, and I’m not gonna spend no million hours singing “Ghetto Child.” [LAUGHS]
But you’ve been singing for a long time, since you were little.
Yeah. Singing is no strange thing.
And you’ve been playing guitar for a long time, too.
Mmm-hmm.
Your father put a guitar in your hand when you were 4.
Mmm-hmm. Yup.
You also said that listening to blues was forbidden when you were a kid.
I was brought up in segregated times in America, and you just didn’t have outlets for all of this bullshit. I mean, it wasn’t an outlet for me to go listen to no blues! Where? The only things in our town was church and school. There wasn’t no nightclub!
So if you’d lived in Chicago or Detroit, you might have heard some blues.
That might have been different. But I wasn’t from Chicago or one of them big old towns. The town I was born in, we didn’t have a movie house, we didn’t have no bus station, the train didn’t stop, or none of that. No taxicab or nothin’. And whitefolks, they had no houses for you to rent! [LAUGHS] That’s how it was. Total segregation.
Where did you hear the blues, then? People around you…
No-no, no-no, no-no. You have to understand, you don’t hear no blues. The only blues we heard was, there were two guitar players in my town—Johnny Wilson and Mr. Alton Smith. Now, they used to do what people CALL blues, is sing about exactly what is happening with them right now and playing the guitar as they sing the story. See, it’s a concept. So that’s what it was. But at that time, they didn’t have it on the radio. They had Chuck Berry on the radio. I remember Chuck Berry singing “Up in the morning and out to school” when I was a young fella going to school down South. That was segregated times. But I didn’t think they had much… We used to have to hear hillbilly music all the time. That’s what we used to call it—hillbilly music. It was very popular on the radio. All the Country and Western music they had in the world, that was being shoved down our throat! [LAUGHS] That’s what we listened to, hillbilly music and church music. Every now and then, Chuck Berry might come and sing “Up In The Morning and Out to School” or something like that. But I never concentrated on listening to radio and listening to music. We was into gospel, and that was our life. Gospel. The whole thing was gospel. We didn’t worry about the blues. You can’t serve God and the devil at the same time, or one or the other. If you’re going to try to go God, you go God. If you don’t care, you don’t care.
Where do you stand?
I was following my Daddy. I ain’t stand nowhere. I didn’t even think. I tell you, I’m a follower! I’m a follower. I don’t make stands. I follow. I followed Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory, and I still follow it, and I followed it so hard until I figured out for me to actually really follow it the best, I have to become a harmolodic person, to be able to follow the harmolodic system. So that’s why I’m talking about blues and jazz and boom-boom, and Third Rail and all this—because I am a harmolodic person.
Is a “harmolodic person” a concept you can parse as elegantly as you can the blues?
See, blues is a concept. You have to fight hard to keep all our concepts alive. Every one equal to each other. We never should let our concept get lost, especially in America. We’ve got to keep each concept of music that was brought from Africa to this country alive, and never let no discrimination be on one or the other. All of them is equal. All of them have to stay alive and exist, and then eventually, hopefully, we can start getting paid for our concept.
So a harmolodic person is one who keeps all of those concepts equal?
Mmm-hmm. You try to work on organizing musicians and trying to get them to play, not to start abandoning our concept, and still keep them alive by still playing them and participating in them.
When you got to Pittsburgh more than 45 years ago, which guitar players did you like then? When you got on the scene and started playing gigs… You were playing organ trios and those sorts of functions, and eventually you grew to idolize Wes Montgomery. But were there other guitar players? Did you study T-Bone Walker or Charlie Christian? I’m just curious.
I heard Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. But my problem was, guitar players ain’t who I would listen to. I would only listen to horn players. I never listened to no guitar players. Because the guitar players, they didn’t ever let them play nothing. On the record, they’d only play one or two choruses, and that was it. But the horn players, they could play out, and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to break through that barrier, where the guitar player can play!
Who were the horn players you liked then?
The regular people. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie. All the old brothers. They’re all ministers. You got to like them. They’re all of them the same. Yeah, you got to like them.
Well, there was a community of talented guitar players in Pittsburgh. George Benson was there, Jimmy Ponder was there…
I only knew one guitar player that was in Pittsburgh that I met, and it was George Benson. And the best guitar player, who taught us all in Pittsburgh, his name was Chuck Edwards. I ain’t never heard of him no more since I left Pittsburgh. But he was a helluva guitar player. He could be the best guitar player not on television.
Did you start working pretty much right away when you got to Pittsburgh?
Working.
Gigs. I think I read you had to choose between music and a straight job.
Oh, I wasn’t working. We would play a couple of gigs… The jobs that were in them times were so low, that you could play one-two-three gigs a week and make more money than you could make working a job. They weren’t offering… My Daddy didn’t send me to no school and I didn’t apply for no student loan. So try to imagine somebody looking for a job in the ‘50s. What kind of job you gon’ have?
Steel mills, I guess.
Oh, my God.
But those were hard to get, I guess, in the ‘50s.
That job was for men who had a lot of children and kids and wives and stuff. I didn’t want to take no man’s job. [LAUGHS] So I never even tried. I never tried to go in the steel mills. I didn’t even know they had the steel mills. I was from down South. Where I’m from, they didn’t have no steel mills. My Daddy told me that he hoped I didn’t have to work as hard as he did. He said that to me very slowly. He said, “I hope – when you – get away and be on your own — that you do NOT – have to WORK – as hard as I do.” And I told him, “Daddy, don’t worry about it. I won’t.” That’s all I remember. So working never was something I thought I was supposed to do. I thought playing music would give you a chance to do something that wasn’t called work. And it’s true. It’s a job, but it’s not a work. Heh-heh. People be trying to WORK. “Yeah, I’m working tonight.” But that’s only in integrated music. Once you start listening to integrated music, then you really come into a lot of contact with who is working tonight, and where you’re at, and where you’re going.
What do you mean by “integrated music”?
[LAUGHS] I said the word…
Do you mean black and white musicians playing together, or mainstream…
No-no, no-no. You have a white guy, you have a black guy, you have a Chinese or Japanese or Indian, and all you-all playing the same song without any offense to the other. I mean, I’ve noticed this in blues. I think integrated music is just music that everybody has the same feelings about. But I don’t know why I say “integrated music.” Because it’s not segregated music. I’m a country boy! See, I don’t know too much…
You’re a country boy. But how long have you had this loft? Around 30 years?
Whoa. I don’t…
I grew up at Bleecker and Thompson, I’m 52, I know this neighborhood pretty well. And Rashied Ali and you are the two musicians I know who have Soho lofts. Have you been here since the ‘70s?
Mmm-hmm. Yeah. [BATTERY ACID FACTORY, 1975] I’ve been here a long time.
It’s a nice feeling being in this loft. It reminds of back in the day what lofts were supposed to be like.
Mmm-hmm. It’s changed. They started making rooms and levels. It used to be space. It was about space. But they changed that up.
Well, this is certainly about space. It’s a workingman’s loft. There’s a story here that the way you came to New York was you had a regular gig at the Bluebird in Detroit, and as you told it, the proprietor said after six months, “Yeah, you can play; when you go to New York, tell Miles Davis I said you should look for him,” but instead you found Ornette. Is that more or less true.
Now that I’m thinking about it, that’s when the thing happened. I got out of Detroit, and the guy who gave me the money to leave town told me, “Go and find Miles Davis and tell him I sent you,” but I never found Miles. I ran into Coleman, but I didn’t never find Miles Davis until a little later.
The guy who gave you the money was the guy who ran the Bluebird.
Yeah. Clarence Edwards, his name was.
So you were playing a lot of straight-ahead, functional music before you came to New York.
Yeah, I did. I did straight music for a while after I got to Detroit. That’s when I came off the road with a group I had called the Blood Brothers. I was playing with Hank Marr, and I had a group called Blood and the Blood Brothers. Then I was in Ohio, and then I left Ohio and then I went to Detroit, and that’s when I really tried to figure out… When I said I didn’t want to sound like Wes any more. That’s when I started changing.
Were you playing during that time what you’d call jazz, or were you doing other gigs as well? Were you playing the blues then…
You didn’t have guitar players play jazz. You got any records with any guitar players on it playing jazz?
Yes, quite a number, I would think.
Yeah?
Yes.
Who?
Which guitar players?
Yes.
Grant Green.
Grant Green wasn’t no jazz player!
How so?
When I’m talking about jazz players, man, I’m talking about Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane playing like that…
Oh, those type of records.
Oh, that’s what I call jazz. And they didn’t have no guitar players on that…
I’m thinking of maybe Pat Martino…
ULMER: No, Pat Martino…
Sonny Greenwich?
No-no. Them brothers ain’t made no jazz scene. I remember them guys. I used to play at the Rock Haven in Montreal, and Sonny Greenwich used to play around the corner in a little club in the hole. But he was playing, though, free music. He was playing real free.
Jim Hall was playing with Sonny Rollins, I guess.
I don’t know… Who was playing… Well, Jim Hall, I’m sure he was a jazz guitar player, because he was always number-one in the guitar book. For all I remember, Jim Hall is the best guitar player in the book for years and years and years.
I take your point. In terms of what the cats in the early ‘60s were doing, guitar was pretty scarce in that scene.
No, there wasn’t no guitar then at all! Nobody played… Wes tried to play with somebody. But I’m talking about inside that jazz MUSIC. That music. Understand? Inside that music. Inside the concept. They call everything “jazz” now. They say Stevie Wonder plays jazz. No, I’m talking about… Man, when I used to listen… Well, we started listening to music in the ‘50s and shit. That shit was played in the ‘40s or something. It wasn’t like new records.
I don’t want to argue this point, but Grant Green did do records with Larry Young, Sam Rivers, people like that…
Yeah, but I don’t look at the organ as being jazz. The organ era, what they call that whole era, they called them organ players progressive jazz players. They made the blues sound like jazz. Now, Larry played differently. I played with Larry myself. He really was trying to play something else on the organ. Yeah, he was. He was different. But most of them, the organ players was a blues type of jazz… They’re turning blues back into jazz, in a certain kind of way. Jimmy Smith was good at that. They called that jazz, but that ain’t the jazz I’m talking about. I remember before they started playing the organ music. I was playing rhythm-and-blues then, but the organ thing hadn’t happened yet. Jimmy Smith hadn’t came out yet; he had a big hit back then on the organ.
When you were off-hours, not working, were you practicing on trying to bring those concepts into your guitar sound…
When I wasn’t working?
In your rehearsal time…
No, I was doing that shit ALL the time! In the night and in the day. I don’t care where I’m doing it. I had to work on it.
When you got to New York, was it Billy Higgins who took you to meet Coleman?
Yes.
How’d you meet Billy Higgins?
He came to the… You got all this information written down there. I had a studio in Brooklyn, and he came over there and played with me, and I played with him, and he said, “Well, I’m going to take you to see Coleman.” That’s what he did.
There’s a video on Youtube of you and Coleman and Higgins in 1974 in Rome.
You like that?
It’s hard to tell. It’s only 5 minutes, the sound isn’t so great.
I’ve seen it once or twice. I remember that day, though. I remember that night in that cave in Rome.
That was in a cave?
Yeah. In Rome.
Let’s jump back to now, then. We don’t have to delve back…
No, it’s cool.
I want to be a bit more clear on how you think of… Well, I guess I do understand what you mean when you say that the guys playing with the organ players were putting jazz onto the blues, which is how I think you put it…
They turned the blues into jazz. That’s what it is. In other words, the guys before that, they were coming from the other side. They were taking freedom into jazz. They were breaking it down to freedom to jazz. Seemed like they all was free players, and then they found out they had to create changes or something. I don’t know if there was any sound.
Did you think of yourself as a free player?
I never played free music after I came to New York. Damn, I was older than Jesus when they said he was crucified by then! [LAUGHS]
So after 1975…
When I came to New York, I was ready to do business.
If the dates are correct, you’re a little younger than Jesus was when you came to New York.
I said almost. They say Jesus died when, 33?
32 or 33.
I came in ‘71.
You were 29 or 28?
No, I was 31.
Oh, you were born in 1940.
Yeah, I was born in 1940. They always say I was born in ‘42. I’ll have to correct that at one point.
So when you came to New York, you felt you’d done everything you could do outside of New York?
No-no, I wanted to start! I wanted to play my music then. I’d been playing with people all before. I always was in a band. In them days, you had to stay in a band to keep playing. I was in a band with George Adams for three years. I was in a band with Rudolph Johnson. Who else… A few other people, piano players. Sonny. Playing in Coleman’s band. You had to be in somebody’s band! I was in a couple of organ bands. In the Hank Marr band. So I said, “I ain’t gonna be in no more bands, I’m going to play my own band now,” when I came to New York. When I got to New York, I got a gig at Minton’s Playhouse for six months, six nights a week with a trio. I went up there and asked them for a gig. First I went up there playing with a few organ players, and then I made a pitch for my own band.
Who was your trio?
It was Doug Hammond and John Dana (bass).
A lot of people must have gotten to know about you during those 6 months.
Well, in Harlem, yeah; there’s a lot of people who were hanging out in that club. I don’t know how much popularity you got from them! But we were entertaining them for six months. That’s all I know.
When did you start doing gigs with Coleman?
Start doing gigs with him?
Performing with him, apart from rehearsing and living…
That’s the reason I went with him, was because he was playing gigs.
The way it goes here, you were living at his loft, you’d play for him, and he’d drill you, and you related having a dream about your guitar tuning while you were living there. I thought that preceded your gigging experience with him.
I don’t know…
Let’s get back to the new record. You wrote the songs when Katrina was happening, from watching the reporting in real time, and you recorded it last December.
Yes, but that ain’t the first I recorded the songs. I recorded the songs before. I got some of them songs on the Internet now. [first recordings]
Sounds like you had a bad week in New Orleans. You lost your voice, your guitar got broken… Can you describe the circumstances of making the record? Being in the studio, putting the record together…
I didn’t have to do that. Vernon did that. All I had to do was play and sing the song.
But in the publicity, you said you lost your voice, or it got hoarse. Your guitar broke. A friend died. It was a bad, bad week…
But the way you’re asking me that is already… It’s hard for me to talk about something you’ve already about. You’ve already heard about it, so I can’t get into that like I’m telling you a story that you never heard before. The way you asked me, I’m going to have to memorize what you said, and I’d rather try to make it up for you. I can’t sound real professional thinking like that.
May I rephrase the question?
You can rephrase.
Tell me what it was like being in New Orleans the week you did the record.
Mmm. I went down there for one reason—to make the record. I wanted to go make the record. That’s what I wanted to do. But I don’t know what happened down there. I don’t really know what happened in New Orleans when I went down there, because I ain’t never had that happen before—when you go to do a job, then you lose your voice and your instrument goes out, and there ain’t nothin’ else you can do. So I had to wait til I go back to New York so I could try to retaliate, which it took me a long time to get over the hoarseness. But I don’t think either that was good or bad. That had something to do with the true essence of what we went there to do—to make a blues record in New Orleans. The instant that that happened was that there’s one place that needed repairing. I mean, a lot of blues exists down there. It still exists. It exists so deeply, because we couldn’t go down there and make a record and say, “Oh, yeah, we made a record and everything went fine.” No. It wasn’t a fine place. The place wasn’t fine. So there had to be obstacles to bring across the true nature of what blues is, to describe something that actually exists. That’s why I said Vernon did a good job, because he made that whole record sound like it was about New Orleans. It wasn’t just those songs that I wrote. Like “This Land,” “Backwater Blues,” “Commit A Crime.” All that shit sounded like New Orleans already. He hooked that shit up real good. I had nothing to do with it. I’m sorry.
You just sang it.
I just did my job! Yeah.
Had you spent much time in New Orleans before?
Had I spent much time? I’ve been there before. I’ve never stayed there over three days in a row, as I recall.
You did a project about 12 years ago that Bill Laswell produced with Zigaboo Modalise, and Amina and Bernie Worrell. That seems to be the only other New Orleans-influenced recording or project you’ve done.
I never went down to New Orleans with Third Rail. That was recorded in Bill Laswell’s studio over in New Jersey.
I mentioned New Orleans because Zigaboo Modaliste was the drummer on it.
I didn’t know he was from New Orleans.
Is today’s rehearsal is for a forthcoming instrumental record?
No, I’m rehearsing.
Have you got new songs for this band? New tunes?
I rehearse concept. I don’t worry about tunes. That’s why everything is so messed up now. Somebody will convince you to play a tune. I work on music concepts. You can put any song in a concept. Any song, if it’s a real song. And if it’s not a real song, you will know it, because it will be something without substance and without meaning and without a direction and without any soul, and it can’t be put in a concept because it ain’t nothin’.
Since Katrina, have you written more songs?
I told you, I work on concepts.
But you wrote songs for… “Katrina” is a song.
“Katrina,” okay, you said I wrote that song. I don’t look at it like I wrote that song. I had nothing to do with that song. They called the thing Katrina. They stood and made happen what happened, not me. I just told the story. It’s like someone reading a book, and then you say, “what did you read? You don’t have to tell me word-for-word, but tell me what you read.” So you tell them what you read. But when you look out into a television, your eyes do the same thing as your mind do when you read a book. You read the book and then you tell the story from what you’re seeing. So I don’t know why people call that writing, they’re doing something. What’s important is the concept.
Shit, I’m looking at you. I’m thinking of a story that I got from you. But it’s your story. It ain’t mine. I ain’t writin’ nothing. You writin’ it. [LAUGHS] You! With the bald head and the wide-rimmed glasses. I can write a story about that, and put it in a blues concept. And you want to say I wrote it!
Well, yeah, you’d be the one who wrote it.
I don’t want to get credit for that any more. I want credit for the concept. I don’t want to take looking on CNN as a story… But I do want to get the publishing. I’m not talking about publishing. I love publishing.
You can’t have it both ways.
I love publishing!
If you love publishing, then you’ve got to acknowledge that you wrote it.
Well, I’m going to accept publishing until the stuff turn around.
Is playing a solo on the guitar similar in any way to telling a story with your voice?
Well, playing a solo on a song is, like I said… Closest I can come to it is when you’re exposing your intellect. Now, if you want to do that, that’s good, if that’s something you want to expose or if you think that what is coming across your mind is…you have a message that you want to deliver—well, so you deliver a message. I think that what players do is, they send out a message. Whether somebody gets the message or not, it’s out there.
Let me ask you one last question, about your attitude towards technique. Anything you want to say about it.
What do you mean by that? Playing the instrument?
Playing the instrument so that you can execute any idea that you think of, communicate the message in as many ways as possible. Did you develop a technique around the ideas you had? Did the ideas you had follow from your technique?
Well, the only thing I know is if you’re talking about the difference between playing an instrument and playing music, which is two different things. Music was before instruments, so if you think you need a technique on an instrument to play music, then you might be making yourself handicapped. Because to have a technique will hinder you from playing music. It’s according to what instrument you’re trying to have technique on. So the technique for an instrument, you have made an A; but you will never be as good as the instrument-maker, because he created the reason why you’re doing what you’re doing. So that’s not good. So you can take an instrument and try to find music on it, but you’re going to have to develop your own kind of technique to get the music out of the instrument. So you might give up a little bit. You ain’t gonna give up too much.
Do you want to do more blues records?
Well…
People keep talking about you “reinventing” yourself, that your turn to the blues is another reinvention.
What is that?
I’m not sure what they mean by that.
Another reinvention. Of what?
I’m not sure. I guess the line of progression goes, you played gospel, you played organ trio music, you reinvented yourself into an “avant-garde” harmolodic musician, then you got some cachet with “Do You Want To Be In America” and influenced Rock people, and then the line of descent goes that you’ve become a full-fledged blues artist in recent years.
But the people who are writing about it, they are not writing about me. They are writing about a record. See, the difference between what you’re talking about is whether a writer is telling you about a person or he’s telling you about a record. Now, if you’re talking about a record, you have to talk about me as blues because you’re talking about only a few blues… Now, I’ve made 40 records! But you forget about ALL of those 40 records…
I have 20 of them.
I’m just saying, if you are talking about these 2, or these 3…
Four.
Four. And those four couldn’t outweigh these…
But it’s only that they’re the most recent records. In the last four years, you’ve done four blues records.
Yeah. But that don’t mean I’m a changed man.
I didn’t think you were.
You’re trying to convince me I done changed because I… You know, even though they had slavery in America, everybody wasn’t no slave. They didn’t get everybody. Because you change on a record, you don’t get everybody… I can’t change…simply because I don’t want to change. Maybe if they give me some money… [LAUGH SNORT]
You’re playing Bonnaroo this summer, right? I see four-five of these big gigs with this band.
Yeah. If they give me about four or five trillion dollars I might change my concept! But no, man. No. I tell you, I like the movement to me going to the blues, because to me, it was like me just trying to say: Okay, I have been doing my thing all my life without nobody messing with me and telling me what to do. Now here’s somebody who wants me to do something that had been done over and over and over again. So I wanted to do it just to prove to myself that maybe I could do something that someone else had been doing. It’s like an examination. You’re at this music school, then it’s time for you to take your test, and they gave me a test and they finally came and said, “Do the blues” [SLAMS TABLE] That was my examination. [SLAMS TABLE] That-[SLAM]-was my examination. [SLAM] I went to school, I did classical…I mean, the gospel, the rhythm-and-blues, the progressive jazz, the blues jazz, and avant-garde, and BOOM, they said, “Okay, you finished graduating; now here’s your test.” [BIG SLAM] Sing these motherfuckin’ 12 blues songs by Muddy Waters. And boom, I said, “Okay, I’ll try that.” So… [SOFT SLAM] Did I pass?
What do you think?
I think I’m passing.
Do you like the records?
Well, I don’t know whether I like the records or not. But I really want to make sure I make an A. I mean, I want this thing to be as successful as it can be, so I can move on. That way I can move on to the next part, to another part. Because you just have to maintain… Always our responsibility is to maintain. You don’t have to stop and don’t move. Like, a lot of artists, man, they stop at blues. They don’t go no farther. That’s all they know. And they call them the greatest in the world. There’s a thousand of them like that. They couldn’t play but one kind of music if they tried. But that’s why all of these concepts should survive, so they stay alive.
Can you visualize what the next phase is going to be?
What phase?
Well, you didn’t say “phase.” So you can move on to the next part, you said.
Yeah, but I’m saying that the move on to the next step…it don’t mean it’s gonna be no phase, whether you’re going to step forwards or backwards.
[END OF CONVERSATION]
**********************
Vernon Reid on James “Blood{“ Ulmer (May 18, 2007):
TP: On each of these records you’ve done with him (this is the fourth one), he’s extremely declarative on your role in the record as producer. His comment a couple of times is, “I’m just doing my job; Vernon really makes the record.” I want to talk to you first about your thought process in putting together the record, and then perhaps we address, either separately or within the same answer, where this document fits, both aesthetically and topically, with the other records you’ve done.
Vernon Reid: This whole process of exploring the blues side of his nature. This whole journey has been one of my most satisfying aesthetically. It really started with an observation, and the observation was that Blood has inhabited many different worlds of guitar, from the organ trio thing to the free jazz thing and the harmolodic thing (which is kind of related, but not quite the same), and even taking the harmolodic thing and incorporating rock elements.
Even before that, he was playing blues jazz for ten years.
Exactly. Like the organ trio thing. So it just was an observation that… It really focused on him vocally. I thought about “Are You Glad to Be In America,” the earliest version of it on the Rough Trade recording. And I just said, you know, he’s a blues singer. Vocally, he’s only been a blues singer.
I ran into Blood in Soho, where he lives, and I said to him, “To me, you’re a blues singer. It’s so obvious.” I would run into him, and I would add to it. I said, “Man, you should make a blues album.” Then I said, “You know, I’d love to hear Blood sing songs in the blues canon.”
Hold the thought a moment. How did he respond when you told him that the first time?
He was kind of gruff. Sort of like, “Oh, so you noticed.” He never was negative, but he was like, “Oh, interesting.” This idea began to really… I began to…obsess is too strong a word, but it became so clear to me that he had an undiscovered original blues voice, that he was on par… I’m really sticking my neck out here, and I stick my neck out a lot. Look, the sound of his voice is on par with John Lee Hooker’s or Muddy Waters’ or Lightnin’ Hopkins’. Literally, the voice that he has is this raw… It really hearkens back to another era of blues. It hearkens back to a whole other thing. It’s just there in plain sight.
Basically, what happened, he mentioned my ravings to an associate of his, who immediately got infected with the idea—“Yeah, you really should do that.” And it started to take on a life of its own to the point where Kevin Calabro, who has been a real partner in helping to create this situation, a young guy, working for the music label Hyena at the time, and he’s a Blood fan and he loved the idea. The way the project evolved is that I had this idea then to look at songs in the canon, and then I started to think about site-specific recordings. I didn’t want to just kind of do blues covers here in any studio. So I thought, we need to go to the South, and we should go to Memphis, to Sun Studio. I kind of was thinking about this place, because I had vowed to return… I was on tour years ago, with Living Color, and we came through Memphis, and I took the tour. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I really do believe that places have something—and this place struck me like a ton of bricks. This is where… Howlin’ Wolf was here. Elvis was here. Johnny Cash was here. B.B. King was here. And I vowed years ago that I’m going to find a way to come back here and do something, and this first record was the opportunity. That was it. I got in touch with the studio, and it functions as a rehearsal place in the day and it functions as an actual studio at night. It just was a thing that took on a rhythm of its own.
Assembling the band… I knew Mark Peterson, and his brother Anthony is a pretty amazing guitarist, who actually is a Shannon alumnus after me… I was introduced to the harp player, David Barnes, while playing around in New York with Michael Hill… Michael Hill to me is a very contemporary version of what Blood… He’s from the Bronx; his people are from the South. He’s a phenomenal guitarist, and he’s got this incredible blues feel, but he’s got chops like Eric Johnson. I sat in with him at B.B. King’s, ironically, and David Barnes was playing with him, and I just was knocked out by the guy. Charlie Burnham had been an old Blood alumnus, from the Odyssey band and so on, and he had a total blues feeling to his playing. I was thinking how the violin is this funny instrument in blues and bluegrass and what have you, and I have fond memories of Papa John Creach and so on. I thought, “Man, this is kind of like a mini-blues orchestra.” That’s how we went down there. We hooked up with Rick Steff, who plays with Cap Power, a wonderful local player who I was introduced to by the studio manager. I said, “I really need a keyboard, and do you have somebody locally.” Rick Steff came in and he totally got it. It was amazing. He totally got IT.
What’s IT?
The IT of it is that Blood’s guitar playing is very much a fusion of the blues and the harmolodic, and you could say even the American primitivist thing. It was not your standard, like we’re playing a B.B. King shuffle thing. It’s not that. It’s never been that. And Rick, coming in, completely got it. He completely got this quirky in-between place. There was no having to explain it, no having to justify it at all to him. He instantly got it. He got the authenticity of it.
That’s when I learned… Blood this whole time kind of agreed to do it. He said, “I’ll do this, but it’s on you.” It was so funny that he was very adamant about that. I was going to take responsibility for what these records are. It was a huge thing. Because on the one hand, here’s the manifestation of an observation. He was saying to me, “You have brought this into my life.” And when we got there, it was clearly more dramatic. I mean, it started to rain. We were in the studio for two days. On this one night, it was like a rainy night in Memphis, and we played “Little Red Rooster,” and we had got it in this one take, and we were listening back to it, and Blood became very, very somber. He said, “THAT’S the blues. That’s the music my mama never wanted me to play.” He just came out with it. I had no idea that he was in a struggle with a conversation about his wife and his family and… It was a stunning revelation. Part of the reason why these records have a certain something is that this is diving into material in his life that in many ways is uncomfortable.
It’s a real existential struggle. His father’s a preacher, he sang gospel for six-seven years, and his mother whupped him for listening to dirty drawers type of lyrics.
Yeah. It really is that. That’s an aspect of it that I think certain people… In making a blues record, it seems as if it’s some kind of move commercially. It’s not. It really borne out of an observation about something in his life. I remember, like, “Back Door Man,” he was so adamant. I wanted to record “Back Door Man” for the first record. He was absolutely adamant that he wasn’t going to do it. And he wasn’t going to do it because… He said to me, “I have been that person.” It was so kind of self-exposing for me that he literally put his foot down. No.
I think there’s a kind of contempt bred of familiarity. We’ve heard the I-IV-V form of it, the 12 bars of it, and we know it so well, it’s so basic and essential to American music that we actually have stopped hearing how essentially avant-garde it is. We literally stopped hearing how… Like, Howlin’ Wolf is. It’s incredible.
Well, for Blood and Coleman, the blues has a certain connotation that probably strikes a little too close to home, and it’s probably what they were trying to get away from all along.
And here I come, just kind of blithely… I felt like such a total bumpkin.
For you, it’s roots; for them, it’s too much roots.
For me, it was so clearly there. One of the things about… I’ve been fortunate. I haven’t done a whole lot of records, but the records I’ve worked on, The Mexican Band Resort, Salif Keita, they’ve been fantastic experiences. It’s something I want to pursue further. But one of the hard things, because I am also an artist… I am in the fray. I am in the struggle of what it is. It’s so much like being a midwife. It’s so holding the hand of the artist, being sympathetic to what the struggle… But it’s also, like, how does this thing, which has a life of its own and an expression of its own…how do I get out of the way and how do I help the artist get out of the way of it? It’s been so powerful to make these records. There have been moments just in the studio where Blood will sing something or play something that’s so unvarnished, and whenever I’ve heard it (it’s happened on every one of these sessions)… I have this obsession with listening to records that I love, and that is: “What must it have been like to be in the studio when Marvin Gaye sang “What’s Going On” or when Coltrane played “My Favorite Things?” You can’t even imagine what it was like. The moments like when Blood takes a solo on “Little Red Rooster,” when he does the chicken clucking on the guitar… There are just these moments on each album, like “Geechee Joe” on the solo album, “Trouble In Mind” on “No Escape From the Blues…” There are other moments on these records as well, but as an example, these are moments that are beyond… To be a witness is something great.
What’s interesting about the solo album is that all of a sudden we get a profusion of original songs, and this songwriting thing starts to take… Well, does it take a different direction? How do you see these songs he’s been writing the last few years vis-a-vis the songs we know him for from the previous 20 years?
Some of them are rereadings of older pieces of his. Like, his rereading of “Where Did All The Girls Come From” for me is revelatory. Because here’s a guy who’s been a lothario, who’s been the back door man.
Seven kids.
Yeah. And lots of attempts. Here’s a guy who has tasted the fruits of the female gender, and here’s a man who has lived also with the regrets—the tears, the broken hearts, all of those things. And his reading of “Where Did All The Girls Come From, I Only Have Enough Money For One,” it’s a heart-rending thing. It’s the other side of “Just a Gigolo”. It’s a very backward-looking…
He was very proud that all 7 of his kids came for his birthday. I sort of thought that’s what it was about…
But he loves his kids. The children are very precious to him. He’s just an incredible mass of contradictions. I never want to get hit with one of them hands! But he’s capable of such tenderness. Such self-reflection. I remember we were doing the session at Electric Lady for No Escape From the Blues, and there was a moment where he had this complete… I forget what song we were doing. The session became completely frozen. He said, “Man, I’ve record forty years, I never had to…” DAHT-DA-DAH… He just ran the whole thing down, and we were frozen. I was sort of, “O-kay, so, now…” Then he just… Like, all his complaints that this was uncomfortable, “I don’t understand what the song’s saying,” he was going through the whole thing… It was one of those things that the control room stopped; we were cutting live, and everyone stopped. Then he said, “But I’ll try it.” I think we were cutting “Trouble In Mind” with the tamboura. Right after he said that, we gave an extraordinary performance. We used the actual vocal from the live thing. So that willingness to…“you know, I’ll go with it.” To get him to record an acoustic guitar instrumental on “High Yellow,” I believe… The studio just happened to have this wonderful Martin, and he was sitting with it, “This guitar is nice; I like this guitar.” I said, “Why don’t you cut something?” Then we GOT it! I’m happy when… I’m aware all the time that he’s giving me permission to have this role. For me, one of the iconic, great…a giant of the music…
At the beginning of our conversation, he said he felt he’d lost his belt as a guitarist, and he’s wanting to get it back. He’d been rehearsing…
I do want to say one thing about his writing. I think his writing is truly autobiographical. I think he’s looking now at the life he’s lived. Because Blood is the blues. That’s the other part of what this thing is. I mean, he is that thing. He is the blues itself. It’s the life. With all the harmolodic this and all the that, and the Music Revelation Ensembles… But he himself, aside from whatever music he’s been playing, he is Leadbelly. He is that guy. He is not, “I came up listening and wanting to be…” No-no. He is that thing itself. That is being revealed through these lyrics. One other thing, too, he hearkens back to a much older time of…his playing is incredibly raw. Another thing, too, is that he, unlike most blues people…it goes right to what has happened in race relations. He has made very pointed… Like “White Man’s Jail”. It’s not “de boss man.” You know what I mean? Of course, this is not the ’50s. The times have given him a latitude that previous generations did not have. That is a difference. But he talks about Geechee Joe… On the new record, “Old Slave Master”. The thing about it, it’s a boogie. What’s so brilliant about “Old Slave Master” is it’s not… It’s very subversive, because it’s kind of like this happy blues, but what he’s saying at the end, “Now, slavery is a whole lot of fun…”
Is it a boogie because of you or because of him?
Oh, no-no, no-no-no.
He wrote it as a boogie?
Oh, yeah. Oh, there was none of, “Let’s make this a boogie.” No-no, no-no-no. He wanted it to have a bounce and be breezy, and then the lyrics are like… In a way, it was a perfect feel for what Bad Blood In The City is. Because the city still will Mardi Gras. The city will still Mardi Gras with all of what the government has not done. That’s a real tribute to it.
In getting this record together, did he come to you with these songs he’d written… He said he was watching CNN when Katrina was happening, and the songs came to him…like reporting almost.
Exactly.
Tell me what happened. Did he come to you with the songs?
I came and had a private session with him… Well, not a session. Private, just listening. He said, “I wrote these songs, and I just saw this thing happening, man, and I just started writing.” Because it was so specific to the event, I was just wondering, well… Then when I heard the first couple of songs, I was relieved. Then also, I was struck by… You know, Katrina happened to all of us as American citizens. Referring to Katrina people as refugees is like… That’s why it’s so outrageous. One thing I was saying to Kevin Calabro is, like, it’s shameful how topical this record is. This record should be dated and old hat. We had a choice of either going…we had to find a place in New Orleans we were going to go to Mississippi. But I wanted to record it in the Gulf region. And Piety Street basically just escaped…
What part of New Orleans is it in?
It’s right on the edge…because of all the parishes… We stayed in Marion Bywater. I’m sure that’s…
Is it on slightly higher land?
Slightly higher land. But you could see where the water went. So we went down there, man, and after hearing Blood’s songs and securing a place to record, finding a spot… Mark Bingham is an ex New Yorker who moved down there, and a lot of great records have been recorded there. We were like, “Okay, this is it,” and we wound up having this incredible experience, an experience akin to when we went to Memphis. The record revealed itself because of the site-specific nature of the recording. It literally would have had a totally different feeling if we hadn’t gone there. It wouldn’t be the same. That record could have been recorded in New York, and it would not have been the same.
Blood said there were a few things, just apart from being in New Orleans… His guitar broke. A friend died. He lost his voice.
Mmm…yeah.
Almost like there was a little voodoo on top of it.
Well, things were going on. A lot of little things were going on. His trademark Berland(?) is not working, and his voice… We basically used what we could. “Sad Days, Lonely Nights,” the Junior Kimbrough tune, that was recorded as it was, and it’s about as raw as it can be. It was like we were up for a battle, and it was getting worse, and it was kind of like okay, we’re just going to have to deal with it. We used the vocal of “Sad Days, Lonely Nights”… There might be one other vocal that’s from down there, but we had to re-record the vocals.
Your role is probably extremely important here as far as picking the songs and pacing the arc of the album. Talk about how you chose the covers? You’ve obviously delved very deeply into the blues literature, on a variety of levels.
The thing about is, I’m kind of a populist. I like a good melody. I’m not an obscurant. The classic songs, like, many scholars are tired of them or what have you… I love “Spoonful”. This record is a real departure from the previous ones in that there aren’t any kind of blues singles. With No Escape From The Blues, part of it was crafting a narrative, “I’m going to New York”… It was crafting a narrative about the migration of the blues from the south to the north. Whereas the first record was very much about being steeped in that steamy Southern thing. That second record was really about the journey of going to New York, the hustle was on. Crafting a narrative. That’s the one aspect of it, is the idea of narrative. That narrative really was shaped literally by the sequencing, because it’s all Blood’s music, for the most part, and him sort of covering himself from the past and what have you.
With Bad Blood In The City it was meditating on the nature of the event, and wanting to create a full spectrum of what the event is. Part of what that full spectrum is has got to be a measure of… I was struck by people going to the studio and coming to the 9th Ward… A live demonstration. I was struck by people sweeping their porches and putting in flowerboxes. I was struck by the people who had cleaned up their houses and tried to return back to life. That to me spoke about a kind of resiliency. So as well as talking about the governmental neglect and the power of Nature that we will never able to anticipate or completely control, then this whole aspect of recovery and hope. I wanted to handle that gingerly, because I certainly am not… I am not totally a “keep hope alive” kind of guy. I don’t know about the bromide approach sometimes.
There are two ways of looking at the blues, I guess. One is the “You can’t play the blues unless you’ve lived the blues” thing, but then there’s the Albert Murray-Ralph Ellison thing of the blues as an affirmation and triumph over death type of thing also.
The thing about the blues is that if you will return to the true abstract… You walk away from the… Because these are downhome people, there’s a kind of overlay onto African-Americans from the South that they don’t have heavy intellectual thoughts, it’s all very kind of roots, and so on. That’s like another cage. The existential nature of it, and the essential avant-garde nature of it is oftentimes just overlooked, because the way we look at the people is kind of unlettered, uneducated, fill in the blank. But there’s a deep sophistication about human nature. Maybe not linguistically perhaps. But there is a deep knowledge about the nature of what people are capable of.
Mother-wit plus.
Absolutely. That’s the thing. Blood really, really is that thing. As I said, he IS the blues. He really is that essentially…
Anyone who’s memorized the Bible is going to have the fundamentals of Western literature at their fingertips, whether they’ve read it or not. I noticed that Blood has a transliterated Koran and a huge Webster’s dictionary on his table… This is a guy who is very specific with words. So that mumble and accent and manner is all a level of indirection.
There’s a fierce, flinty intelligence. Do not be misled. Picking the songs, the other songs, it became… What I do is, I assemble a lot of material, and I listen to it, and I just think about it. One thing was just listening to Blood’s things, thinking of Blood’s music, the tunes, and then thinking about the actual event… You know, Backwater Blues. That was a suggestion, I must admit. Kevin suggested it, and I listened to it and was knocked out. Because this whole notion… You think about what happened in the ‘20s, you think about what happened in Galveston…
That 1927 New Orleans flood was on-purpose. That’s why people thought they had done it on purpose this time.
You know what I mean? With all the high talk about “we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that,” and so on… It’s like the electrical grid. It’s like the highway system. There are these things that are sagging. Literally, these things are sagging. And we’ve got to talk about what we have to do, and then all of a sudden it quiets down, and you’ll see construction, and then nothing happens, nothing changes. That’s what that was about. Whereas when I found “This Land,” I was stunned. It’s one of John Lee Hooker’s greatest lyrics. It speaks to Vietnam, it speak to the Middle East… This whole idea of “the land they walk on…” It’s Shakespearean. “The land they walk on is their burial ground.” This is like every civil conflict on earth. And to relate that to New Orleans, the land itself is such a powerful signifier in that part of the country. We are engaged in conflicts. Katrina is also the simultaneity of being involved in conflicts overseas. So the whole notion of this land, whether that land is about uniting people who have become insurgents because of American action, and to essentially “get the fuck out of my country,” and what’s happened in the Gulf region, where they’ve allowed these incredible resources, the wetlands and so on, to be eroded and destroyed. So it was an attempt to look towards what that is. And how it Africanized was really funny. It was like we got in there, I saw a balafon. I said, “There’s a balafon here?” I said to the assistant, “I want everything you got!” Aubrey Dayle did a phenomenal job. He’s a classically trained percussionist, so he brought his… He’s an African-Caribbean-Canadian who brought a huge skill set to… I’m going to have to single out Aubrey Dayle in the band. He did a fantastic job on this record. This record in many ways was Aubrey’s record, because he played great and he did so many different things percussively on the record that, in fact, right before… On “Sad Days, Lonely Nights,” that’s Aubrey’s voice that goes, “Let’s go.”
Let me ask you two more aesthetic questions. The way Blood spoke about his attitude to the covers is that he hadn’t really listened to any of the versions that made the songs famous, that he doesn’t want to listen to them because then he won’t be able to…
To reinterpret.
To reinterpret. He made a comment on “Ghetto Child”… [ETC.] Then I also want to talk about how you approach pitting off the two guitar styles. Your response to him, and how Blood plays… He said he can’t PLAY when he sings.
On the question of his interpretations… Ultimately what happens is, I assemble the covers, like Willie Mitchell’s [sic: Dixon] “Dead Presidents”… Did I say Willie Mitchell? I had a brain fart. What?!!
I assemble the pieces that I think fit in, that tell a narrative. I also assembled many, many more songs. There are always songs that are left off. Ultimately, I make a stab, and it really does come out to be a fusion of the narrative… Ultimately, Blood makes the decisions of what songs he wants to sing, what songs he can feel, and then that becomes the narrative. When he heard “Commit A Crime,” he immediately went, “Oh yeah!” “I will LEAVE you, woman.” He basically finds his own way into it. If he can “understand” what the lyric is, then he will find a way to interpret. Then he can interpret. If he doesn’t get it…
Then it’s not going to work.
And I never, ever, ever, EVER say… I don’t go into a justification session with him. I don’t do it. Because it just doesn’t work at the end of the day. Convincing? I would hope that if he finds it himself, upon reflection… Because he can be an extraordinarily reflective person. If he finds it upon reflection, then fine. He’s found his own pathway to it. But if he’s like, “Nope,” it is out of there. Because it just doesn’t work. I don’t give orders and I don’t kind of passively-aggressively give orders by “suggesting.”
The guitar styles intermeshing…
Or not-intermeshing.
Or not-intermeshing, yeah, right. I’m getting with someone who has influenced me a great deal. But it’s funny. When I’m influenced by people, I don’t really imitate what they do. The influence is subtler than that. And he’s been a tremendous influence on me—him and Sonny Sharrock, and Fripp and everyone else. Part of it is to stay out of his way, and a lot of times a sort of irrational exuberance takes over on my part! I’ll go back and go, “Oh…well, shucks.” But I get so… In the sessions where we’re playing together, he oftentimes will… Especially when we’re playing live in the studio, he’ll kind of indicate who wants to solo. We basically set up the conditions. We go… Sometimes we talk ahead of time. Oh, Charlie will take a solo here or David will take a solo there. On this record it was funny, because it was sort of six of one, half a dozen of the other… The solos that I take, soloing-wise, we were kind of jamming, kind of cooking it up, and then he’d nod at me, and then I’d go, and it was sort of a very cathartic… Like, Wow! Other than that, though, I try to stay out of his way. I definitely try to stay out of the way.
Does he play harmolodically on this?
I think he does. On “Commit A Crime,” there’s a distorted guitar solo, the first one… That’s Blood. I love it when he does that. I dig all of his guitar stylings, but I dig it when he… It’s a whole other trip when he does distorted guitar. Like, it’s so cool! I remember just kind of coaxing him to do it when we were recording No Escape From The Blues. Someone had built him a Germanium kind of buzz box, and he brought it to the session. I said, “Step on the silver box right here,” and everything kind of explodes, and I love that.
Thank you for being positive. It’s strange. This is off the record. But to me, the New York Times kind of doesn’t get it, and they don’t get it for kind of obvious reasons. A blues thing… People don’t know that Blood struggles with it. It’s so natural to hear it…it’s so obvious.
I think it would be hard for most white guys writing about it to attribute doubt to Blood, with his persona. That’s why I’m glad I went to his house to talk to him.
There is a certain… It’s almost like Alan Lomax, this whole story about Leadbelly wanted to play this concert, and Alan Lomax insisted he wear kind of work clothes, and he wanted to wear his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. There’s a certain sort of… Alan was a giant of the music and he was a very positive person, but he kind of… [END OF SIDE A] …this is a real thing. So aside from his great artistry, I just have a huge amount… I mean, I love the dude, and I have a huge amount of respect for him stepping into something he’s really uncomfortable with. He loves it, though. That’s the thing, too. It’s the case of an older artist finding and coming into something really powerful and new… It’s a tremendous…
He had a great quote about it. He said: “I have been doing my thing all my life without nobody messing with me and telling me what to do. Now here’s somebody who wants me to do something that had been done over and over and over again. So I wanted to do it just to prove to myself that maybe I could do something that someone else had been doing. It’s like an examination. You’re at this music school, then it’s time for you to take your test, and they gave me a test and they finally came and said, ‘Do the blues’ [SLAMS TABLE] That was my examination. [SLAMS TABLE] That-[SLAM]-was my examination. [SLAM] I went to school, I did classical…I mean, the gospel, the rhythm-and-blues, the progressive jazz, the blues jazz, and avant-garde, and BOOM, they said, ‘Okay, you finished graduating; now here’s your test.’ [BIG SLAM] Sing these motherfuckin’ 12 blues songs by Muddy Waters. And boom, I said, “Okay, I’ll try that.” So… [SOFT SLAM] Did I pass?”
I totally feel… How does a mountain describe itself? Can a mountain describe itself? It’s a weird thing. But one thing is, we got used to do that Martin Scorsese thing. That’s on the strength of him doing basically one record. People who really listen to this stuff, who hear it, they know what it is.
It seems he’s become part of the national roots music circuit through these records. Like the thing with Alison Kraus at Radio City, or being booked at Bonnaroo this summer. I know he’s been part of a certain aspect of pop consciousness for 25 years, but this seems to be bringing him into an interesting space.
Into an interesting space, yes. Honestly, the other thing, I wasn’t really paying attention to it, but the whole… With the Junior Kimbrough thing, when he was getting into it, I thought, “Man, this cat is phenomenal.” The Junior Kimbrough and the R.L. Burnside thing, there’s a certain aspect that is part of it, but it’s so funny, because I’ve listened to these things sort of after the fact, so it’s sort of related to it, but it’s not modeled on any of those things. It’s like the conversation we had about “Let’s Talk About Jesus.” Wow!
It’s a wonderful journey, and I feel like because it’s kind of evolved… I had a plan at one point. My original thought was: make one record in the South, one record in the industrialized north, and then make a record in London. That was my original plan. And events developed to shift what that is. I’m just happy that I didn’t become… You know how it is when a kid doesn’t get to do what he wants to do? They stamp their foot and lay on your back on the ground… Now, happily, Blood turned and said, “I want to do a record by myself.” I didn’t hem and haw. I was like, “Okay.” It literally has taken on a life of its own. If we are to go to London, it will reveal itself.
One other thought I’ve had about a furtherance of the project is possibly go to Africa. That just occurred to me two days ago, to go to Bamako, or… Or Chicago. But whatever it is, it will reveal itself. It’s not going to be… It sort of becomes high concept after the fact. Like, once it’s revealed, then we started to work on realizing it.
You don’t know how Blood is going to treat these. You just have the sense that these are generally suited to his tonal personality, then he does what he does.
He does what he does. We’ve just been very, very fortunate. The other thing is, the band is just phenomenal. Each one of them…
[END OF CONVERSATION
Today Is The Question: Ted Panken on Music, Politics and the Arts 