People have been asking about Anders Osborne, whose band of several years is no longer working together regularly. Osborne has been producing and writing in 2003 after embarking on a project with Shanachie records to produce and record with Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and the Golden Eagles. Bury the Hatchet was a tremendous collaboration with Boudreaux. Osborne also co-wrote “Watch The Wind Blow By,” the latest single from Tim McGraw’s double-platinum CD. Osborne also played with George Porter and Johnny Vidacovich, produced the latest Andy J. Forrest album, Deep Down Under in the Bywater and is scheduled to do two gigs at B.B. King’s in New York this month (December 5 and 6) backed by John Gros on keyboards, Kirk Joseph on sousaphone and Kevin O’Day on drums. Gros played in Osborne’s band back in the early 1990s.
“I’m kind of in transition,” Osborne noted. “I’m trying to focus on just writing. I’m doing a lot of writing, co-writing. I write for all kinds of stuff. I enjoyed doing the album with Andy. I know him from back when I first came to town and I used to do the Tuesday night thing at Checkpoint Charlie. Everybody was kind of hanging out there.
“There’s definitely something special with me and Andy,” he said. “What I like about Andy is the way he writes in a different kind of poetic style especially with his blues background. My gut feeling was that he needed to be a little more traditional blues on this record, like Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester. Both of us knew we had to find a space that was a little more traditional blues style.”
The deal with Shanachie eventually went bad, leaving Osborne without a working record deal. But the opportunity to work with Boudreaux was worth the experience. Anybody who saw them perform knows how incendiary this lineup was.
“It was wild,” Osborne recalled, “I don’t know how to explain it. There was an immediate bond between us—it was instantaneous. I was playing behind him and he kept turning around and looking at me. He’s got such beautiful, subtle wisdom.”
Osborne enjoyed all the attention paid to the blues in 2003.
“I thought it was a great thing,” he said of the “Year of the Blues.” “It’s American folk music. I love folk music, any kind of folk music. Some of the kids feel that it’s oldtimer music, but music is for everybody. If the emotion is there it’s valid. Traditional New Orleans jazz can make me cry. It’s real music, real folk music. The same goes for the traditional folk music I grew up with in Sweden. Some of that early Delta stuff really gets me going.”
BLUES AT MEDIA EXPERIENCE
The inaugural New Orleans Media Experience was a perfect tie-in with Voodoo Fest because it targeted a similar demographic, the digital-age audience that gets its music via video games, soundtracks and music videos. The theme of the conference, “Worship at the altar of convergence,” articulated a vision of an entertainment industry future in which popular music, film and video games are involved in a complex symbiotic relationship.
Nevertheless, the Experience included several great music programs, including outstanding music documentaries on the Memphis blues sound and gospel queen Mahalia Jackson. The Memphis documentary compared favorably to the recent PBS “Blues” documentary series.
“I wanted to stay away from using the same stock footage you see in all the blues documentaries,” said producer/director Jeff Scheftel. “We did a lot of primary source research to unearth period footage that no one has used before.”
My favorite moment of the festival was the advance screening of My Dinner With Jimi written by Howard Kaylan of the Turtles about his personal experience of traveling to England with his hit-happy but somewhat un-hip band in the Summer of Love, 1967. The Turtles were heckled in a swanky Soho nightclub by John Lennon himself before Kaylan’s hilarious dinner scene with the yet-undiscovered Jimi Hendrix. Kaylan’s irreverent view of the pop icons of the day is very much in keeping with his subsequent work as part of the Flo and Eddie team in Frank Zappa’s band. Jimi never wore that velvet suit again.
THE HOWLIN’ WOLF STORY
Dozens of blues DVDs have been released this year, but The Howlin’ Wolf Story (Bluebird) deserves special mention. Part of Bluebird’s Secret History of Rock & Roll series, the project is a comprehensive video biography put together by director Don McGlynn with the full cooperation of Chester Burnett’s family and former band members. The DVD includes priceless home movie footage from drummer Sam Lay of Wolf performing at the legendary Silvio’s nightclub in Chicago, and several other live recordings, including Wolf’s only nationally televised performance on Shindig with the Rolling Stones sitting in the audience.
The portrait of Wolf is unsentimental. At one point we see Wolf stop a show to berate Son House, who was sitting in the audience. “You had a chance wit yo’ life but you ain’t done nothin’ wit it,” Wolf says, waving a menacing finger at Son House. “You don’t love nothin’ but one thing and dat’s whiskey!”
Wolf, who learned guitar from Charley Patton and played with Robert Johnson, was the first of the Memphis blues stars to move to Chicago and trigger the migration that would transform Delta blues into Chicago blues. The Howlin Wolf Story nails this transformational moment down cold and gives us a most complete view of one of the greatest musicians in American history.
