Somebody Declared This The Year of the Blues! 9/10/03

by Alan Greenblatt

Congress, or somebody, has declared this the "year of the blues." The Kennedy Center, never the sort of organization to shy away from a theme, seized on this factoid and decided to devote its annual open house this past Sunday to the blues, "America's National Anthem," as jazz historian Grover Sales likes to say. While we await the blues miniseries airing on PBS later this month, the Kennedy Center smorgasbord wasn't a bad treat.

The harmonica whiz James Cotton filled the Concert Hall with a joyful noise. Cotton has been around forever -- he played with Muddy Waters long ago -- and knows how to please a crowd even with an unlikely instrument. He came onstage, wearing a florid blue and red shirt and a little gray cap, blowing some of the most high-pitched squeals you can imagine. His playing is generally staccato, with just a burst of squeal or pithy phrase. But he also likes to show off his lungs with some unending, repetitive in-and-out blowing.

Much of the material was familiar, including those festival standbys "Sweet Home Chicago" and Let the Good Times Roll." Cotton had a very proficient and unshy band behind him, featuring perhaps most notably Slam Allen, an amiable singer and guitarist who has learned something about vibrato from B.B. King. All of this wonderful hokum -- loved the way Cotton would slap his harp with his right hand, as if it were a naughty child -- created a higher energy level at times than any I had experienced in witnessing many dozens of performances at the Kennedy Center (although concerts by Mercedes Sosa, Youssou N'Dour, Betty Carter and the San Francisco Symphony playing Gershwin provided more sustained excitement. Ah, nostalgia).

There was an entirely different energy in the Concert Hall when Odetta took the stage. There she was all in her tie-dyed finery. Her speaking voice was so small that I was concerned her singing voice would be weak. If you never heard Odetta sing back during her folk revival glory days in the 1960s or since, she's certainly unique, her voice so plummy and low and nasal. Sometimes her diction is perfectly distinct and other times the words get all slurred up into a big growl. She sang songs that would not have been out of place in any children's singalong -- old folk tunes such as "The Rock Island Line" and "This Little Light of Mine." When the audience didn't sing along with sufficient gusto on the latter, Odetta chided us, saying something like when you're affirming yourself don't do it in a whisper.

But she made everything sound political, explaining what an old history racial profiling has in this country and noting how the types of venereal diseases you could catch back in her day, introducing "Careless Love," were nothing compared to what's going around now. She reminded everyone "especially the oldsters," to wear their condoms. Her speeches were refreshingly Old Left, something you don't hear so much nowadays and only a tad self-satisfied in her own wisdom.

That's about all we paid attention to. We missed a lot of things, including the great young blues shouter Shemekia Copeland. Wandering around the building, between the different companies giving away keychains and other junk (Target stores were giving away harmonicas, so everywhere you heard the wheezing, screendoor-creaking sound of little kids blowing tunelessly on the things), you could hear B.B. King's daughter Shirley promising to pitch a wang dang doodle all night long or some group called the West River Blues Crabs picking some pleasant twangy guitar and offering a demonstration on how white white people can sound singing this music.

The whole event was well managed, with good crowd control and free tickets required for events in the smaller venues. Nothing is quite as haphazard or freeflowing as it used to be, not even turning over an entire performance complex to blues musicians and little kids.