Sometimes I feel like I'm way behind the retro times. For example, until just now, I'd never heard of Blind Boy Paxton, apparently one of the hottest young black retro country blues players on the current scene. (They're charging $10 for one set when he plays a Brooklyn club named Jalopy on a Monday night in June). He dresses like Blind Lemon and plays like Blind Blake. In the first video, some might say that he's engaging in minstrelsy. You tell me. He's blind for real. And he can play. The third video is a real find, and it's what started all the talk:
Be sure to check out this review/bio on The Country Blues website, written by Frank Matheis, a guy who has seen everything. He raves:
http://www.thecountryblues.com/artist-reviews/jerron-blind-boy-paxton/
Last Edited by on Apr 23, 2012 7:57 PM
He's incredibly talented. I think I first came across him from the Playing For Change videos. The Jalopy supports a fairly robust folk scene in Brooklyn. This year, they will present the 4th annual Brooklyn Folk Festival:
http://www.brooklynfolkfest.com/
BBP definitely has his schtick, but I don't think it detracts in anyway from his music. It certainly is difficult to tell where the BBP persona ends and Jerron Paxton begins. In my opinion, Matheis’ praise is merited; BBP is a rare musical talent.
He’s an ultra-traditionalist. As Matheis puts it, he doesn’t “like anything written after 1934.” Perhaps that attitude won’t go over well on a forum where a premium is placed on modern approaches to old musical forms, but I think he brings something very valuable to the table. Prewar blues is an idiom that few can recreate with the same degree of success as BBP. He’s not only a traditionalist but also a conservationist.
With the regards to the charge of minstrelsy, he’s definitely aware of this dynamic and addresses it in his performances. A friend of mine who regularly goes to shows at the Jalopy told me he once purposefully made his mostly white audience uncomfortable by frequently using the n-word and trying to get them to repeat it. This was perhaps an off-putting way of calling attention to a very real aspect of the contemporary blues scene.
Here are two more videos that well illustrate his abilities:
The “Stack O’Lee” performance includes some of what I was talking about above.
That piano playing is stunning. This guy is a force to be reckoned with. As for his stage persona: he's a man of mystery.
I have no problem with traditional folk music, as such. I enjoy a performance of old-time string band music as much as the next man. But when somebody dresses up like Bill Monroe, plays "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" circa 1949, and tries to convince me that it's old-time string band music rather than a recreation AS old-time string band music of what was, in its own time, a strikingly modern reinvention of old-time string band music--string-band music on speed, so to speak--I refuse to be a fool and pretend that A is B, or concede that something new is being done. Guys like Blind Blake WERE doing something new. They were translating ragtime piano into guitar terms. Bill Monroe WAS doing something new. Somebody who comes along 50 or 75 years later and plays Bill Monroe as well as Bill Monroe isn't doing something new, which is to say he isn't doing what Bill Monroe did. Blind Boy Paxton isn't doing something new. He's just playing an old style really, really well. The difference makes a difference to some of us, although by no means to all of us. Certainly what he's doing right now as a recreationist will make him money and gain him applause.
But brilliant musicians--and BBP shows every sign of being a prodigy--have a way of surprising us. I expect to be surprised by what he ends up doing as he keeps on growing. Guy Davis, for example, began in something like BBP's vein, but he's gone on to do some strikingly original stuff, including a dialogue with his son--a blues/hip-hop battle--that won him a whole lot of fans on NPR.
Last Edited by on Apr 24, 2012 4:50 AM
I agree that BBP is not a musical innovator. I doubt he could pass the three second test (although he could probably trick most people into thinking they were listening to something that was recorded 80 years ago). I also agree that after a while the recreationist act will grow stale and I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts to develop more of his own musical voice.
I think a large part of the intrigue that surrounds BBP stems from the incongruity of someone who looks and sounds as he does performing in contemporary Brooklyn. He aims for a surreal time-travel effect, but, as you pointed out, it’s an illusion that has its flaws.
I need to think about this more, but I wonder to what extent the act of carbon copying something old and placing it in a new context constitutes the creation of something new. Whatever the answer may be, I think we can all agree that there is plenty of room for BBP to push out and explore the musical tradition over which he has demonstrated such mastery. He certainly has the skills to do so.
You know, your speculation in the third paragraph makes a lot of sense; I was brooding on that point during my morning run. The point you make in your previous post about him pushing his audience to use the n-word--and making them uncomfortable by doing so--suggests that he is, in fact, quite conscious of the retrograde dream he might be conjuring up for some people and, like a modernist (or like Brecht), trying to unsettle that easy, fits-like-a-revivalist-glove relationship.
In BLUES PEOPLE, Leroi Jones argued that black popular music in America--and blues and jazz in particular--offered a pretty good index of the accommodation/resistance dialectic as experienced by African American men down through American history. Basically he argued that black creative artists in those two idioms were ceaselessly, restlessly pushing forward, in stylistic terms, because white jazzmen, and behind them mainstream America, kept jumping on the latest black music, albeit slightly behind the beat, and adapting/distorting/profiting from them, creating a somewhat diluted white variant. So the swing dynamism of early jazz becomes "swing" music played by the Glenn Miller big band. That's why Bird and Dizzy create bebop: because swing has been coopted. When the white boys catch up, Miles goes cool. When Chet Baker catches up to THAT, the hard-bop/funky movement of the late 50s/early 60s happens, where blues is added back into jazz in a way that brings it home to the black community: "Chitlins Con Carne," "Moanin'," and the like. Meanwhile Coltrane is on his own wild trip, and no white boys can keep up with that.
Everything works in line with Jones's schema until Wynton Marsalis comes along in 1980: a virtuoso with a classical background as well as jazz background, and somebody who seems much more interested in keeping jazz in a mainstream / hard-bop headlock rather than pushing it over the rainbow in a fusion way, or wailing the free blues like Trane and Pharoah Sanders, or deconstructing and reconstructing it like P-Funk. Suddenly, according to Gary Giddins, the hip young black jazzers are conservators, historians of the music, rather than edge-pushing innovators. In retrospect, one thing that was happening at that point was that integration had happened, was working, and young black jazzmen were beginning to make their way into the centers of cultural power--specifically, Wynton was being made the head of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Meanwhile, Giddins argued, the real innovations in jazz were being continued by, of all people, the white boys. Heck, Wayne Krantz was a part of that.
The blues side of this cultural equation has worked somewhat differently and I don't have the time to sketch it out now. One thing that happened was that the burgeoning white audience and cohort of white blues performers found itself mourning, consciously and unconsciously, the weird fact of whiteness's relative numerical triumph: the fact that black audiences for the blues were drying up and that younger black performers, too, were much rarer than younger white performers. This created a palpable anxiety. One way this anxiety was addressed was the summoning and annointing of "children of the blues": Shemekia Copeland, Lurrie Bell, Kenny and Noel Neal, a younger generation of, so to speak, blues royalty directly descended from the African American elders. Art Tipaldi's book, CHILDREN OF THE BLUES, helped me understand this dynastic dynamic.
In the last five years, the conservator vision of African American blues has reached back beyond traditional electric blues into traditional acoustic blues. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, recently featured on the cover of LIVING BLUES magazine, are at the center of this, and Blind Boy Paxton strikes me as very much a part of this dynamic. Leroi Jones might, if he wanted to, argue this emergence one of two ways. He might say that the ascension of the black middle class over the past two decades, crowned by Obama's election as President, has meant that younger black creative artists now have a much broader spectrum of palpably viable stances towards earlier black musics. They don't need to run away from the old-sounding (and by this point completely white-coopted) musics of the past--musics that correlate to some extent with pre-Black Liberation accommodation to Jim Crow and the like--but can, instead, reclaim them as a valuable cultural resource. A second, more combative Jones-ish take might be: They most definitely ARE reclaiming them, wrenching them away, from the white traditionalists who have profited from them for quite a few decades now, and since the music was, at the moment of its initial creation and therefore still is, in some essential way, BLACK music, they're much more persuasive interpreters, carriers, of those old traditions. They're keeping the music real, in a sense. Or making it substantially, or merely incrementally, more real--even as the recreationist dynamic adds a certain surreality to the whole process.
I don't know where I come down on all this stuff, except to say that I'm as fascinated as the next audience member by this sort of uncanny recreation, and there's no denying the bravura of his playing.
"Everybody has to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer." --Anonymous
Last Edited by on Apr 24, 2012 9:48 AM
As someone who appreciates the pre-war blues, I'm excited that a young man with such talent has decided to present it to a contemporary audience. This breathes life into it that listening to scratchy recordings can't do. I like his attitude, that he is putting it out there in a way that provokes reflection.
My hope for him is that he follows his interest in this genre as long he needs to and then allows himself the freedom to bring himself to his music and take it where he needs to go. After seeing Paxton's talent and attitude, I can't help but think of another young man who started out channelling the folk tradition of a bygone age, and after gaining a huge following at that, unapologetically forged his own path. ----------
Just a few comments on kudzurunner's last post, not intended as any sort of rebuttal:
With regard to the progression of the development of jazz, the torch was passed to the white artists (actually more integrated but with white or other than black bandleaders) when Joe Zawinul, while in the Miles Davis band, dominated the band with his contributions in "In A Silent Way" and Bitches Brew" and left with Wayne Shorter to establish Weather Report, and its stranglehold as the Number One jazz band in the world for many years. Miles was passed quickly and could not catch up. Also from that Miles Davis band came John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Tony Williams Lifetime, Chick Corea and Return To Forever etc. (the other exception to dominance of white bandleaders was Herbie Hancock and The Headhunters). The black jazz artists, traditional or otherwise, were left in the dust for years. The only exception was the last great explosion from Dexter Gordon in the '70's when he returned from European exile, and which maintained the bebop roots for a while longer. I do remember seeing the Wynton Marsalis Quintet in 1983 (Branford Marsalis on sax and Kenny Kirkland on piano) as the first all-black straight ahead jazz quintet emerging on the scene. It was the onset of smooth jazz and its R&B tones and its taking hold with the black middle class, which I would argue ruined jazz while simultaneously reclaiming it as a black root music. The all-black VSOP Quintet, which reformed the classic pre-fusion Miles Davis lineup - Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Freddie Hubbard - played a lot of post bop traditional jazz in the '70's as sort of a retrospective.
With regard to the progression of the blues from the same view, although there are many emerging traditional black artists, the explosion of white artists is formidable as well. A look at the lineups on the twice a year Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruises, or the band advertising in various blues magazines will make that point very clear indeed. I don't think that they are wrenching anything away. I think that there is a healthy competition which is not race based at all. I have noticed however, at least on the October 2011 Blues Cruise, that while black artists were not ignored by the overwhelmingly white cruise goers, the crowds were bigger for Charlie Musselwhite than for Billy Branch, for Jimmy Thackery and Tommy Castro than for Bobby Blue Bland, Bobby Womack and Lionel Young. There is a preference, (in my opinion, from what I saw, and not my preference) by white knowledgeable and educated blues fans as on these cruises, for the white performers. Just an observation.
The re-emergence of the traditional Chicago blues with the Chicago Blues - A Living History albums - Billy Branch, Billy Boy Arnold, Lurrie Bell, and John Primer - is an indication of a desire and need to re-establish and preserve the blues of previous eras, and in my opinion is an indication of a renewed interest in the traditional styles, and the carrying of the torch which will be picked up by modern black blues artists.
Last Edited by on Apr 24, 2012 11:20 AM
@atty: Amen to your comments, by and large. The only thing I'd say is that, at this point, Weather Report AND Wynton AND Grover Washington Junior AND Kenny G. all find themselves in the playlists of many jazz shows--shows tending towards smooth jazz but with a mix that encompasses mainstream. It's the screamy and/or highly discontinuous non-mainstream stuff that doesn't get played as much.
One of the most inventive jazzmen I knew was Mark Reboul, a nerdy white guy with glasses who was in the class ahead of me at Princeton. He later became part of a downtown NYC scene and played with a group called The Higher Primates. They played free jazz: six or seven guys improvising COMPLETELY free stuff, with no key center, no script, just...making it up, going with the flow, and really being creative. When he was at Princeton, he used to sit in with Richie Cole--a straight ahead Phil Woods wannabe, and a good one--and he could blow Cole off the stage. He kept evolving. A true creative artist.
I remember Richie Cole from when I was younger, he was really good. Then I'll have to check Mark Reboul out. That sounds a little like the direction of Modern Jazz Quartet, is it? Sonny Rollins is still playing in his '80's. I saw him a few years ago, and he played brilliantly for over an hour with maybe 5 minutes break squeezed from a song. Amazing. Until Joe Zawinul died in 2007, The Zawinul Syndicate was cutting edge in world music with a jazz feel; he also revisited Weather Report material with the WDR Big Band, among other projects. A huge loss.
Last Edited by on Apr 24, 2012 1:50 PM
