John Lee Hooker Centennial this year celebrated with a new career-spanning release John Lee Hooker was born near Clarksdale, Mississippi on August 22nd, 1917. After running away from home at age 14, he made his way to a factory job in Detroit, Michigan, via Memphis, and Cincinnati. It was there, in 1948, his first recording, “Boogie Chillun,” was made, selling over a million copies.
To begin the centennial celebration of Hooker’s birth year, Vee-Jay Records, a division of Concord Bicycle Music, will release Whiskey & Wimmen: John Lee Hooker’s Finest, on March 31st. The multi-label compilation features songs from Hooker’s Vee-Jay, Specialty, Riverside and Stax Records releases, and includes many of the bluesman’s most iconic songs.
Gil Scott-Heron
Gil Scott-Heron was one of the most influential spoken-word poets of late 1960s and early 1970s. His post-beat poetry concerned a wide array of urban socio-economic, political, and racial issues. The ‘Godfather of Rap’ absorbed stylistic inspiration from Langston Hughes, Malcolm X and Huey Newton. A self-described “bluesologist” concerned with the traditions of blues and jazz music, he was born in Chicago, and grew up partly in Tennessee and the Bronx. Worldly and wordy from a very young age, he published his first volume of poetry at the age of 13. While attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he started the band Black & Blues with musician/producer Brian Jackson.
The ‘revolution’ began when Heron recorded his well received debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox on Flying Dutchman Records in 1970. The album opened with the hip anthem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” which derives its name from a catchphrase used by African-American activists during the 1960s. The next year, Scott-Heron recorded Pieces of a Man, marking a shift to a funkier-sounding yet more structured album. In 1974, Scott-Heron and Jackson released their collaborative album Winter in America on Strata-East Records, which retrospectively became their most critically-acclaimed work. Winter in America delivered a combination of blues, soul and jazz with his rapping and often melismatic singing. These early works of Gil Scott-Heron were seminal to styles of music such as hip-hop, neo-soul, and contemporary jazz. http://www.westword.com/music/gil-scott-heron-a-bluesologist-cultural-anthropologist-and-black-icon-5702821
“Miles was right. We didn’t understand harmonically or structurally what he and his band were doing. They had another kind of vocabulary, which came from a higher form of musical expression. It came from a special place—from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane—and at the same time it was deep in blues roots and expanded into funk and rock sounds” – Carlos Santana recounts meeting Miles from Ashley Kahn’s book Santana.
This VH-1 Duets concert from May 9th 1996, captures Clapton in his mid-nineties blues embrace and Dr. John belting New Orleans R&B vocals as only he can. Quite a pairing!
Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated with Mick Jagger in 1962
“While it’s easy to associate British blues strictly with its superstar proponents—especially guitar gods such as Clapton, Page, and Beck—it’s easy to overlook the lesser-known acts who were intricately woven into the British blues family tree as well, in many cases providing a sort of minor-league club team system that supplied top players for the major league stadium fillers who would follow.” British Blues Top 10
