BLUE-ISH

Backstage, August 1969, at a major music festival: The harmonica player carried a leather pouch the size of a travel first-aid kit.  She called the set-up a Kentucky saxophone.  It contained shot glasses and whiskey.

Three days of peace and 12-bar blues.

The Ann Arbor Seltzer Festival.

I’m losing it . . .  the Ann Arbor Blues Festival.

“Got My Mojo Working.”  How many times can you listen to that?  A lot. The festival was three days of just blues.  Big Mama Thornton was the booze-packing harp player.

We — the student organizers of the festival — allowed black customers in for free.  Not many took us up on the offer.  This was the festival of Black Music for White People.  Four of the five organizers were Jewish. The event was produced by the University of Michigan’s student activities center and Canterbury House, the  local Hillel for Episcopalians.

We were up against the Atlantic City Pop Festival that weekend:  Janis Joplin, Santana,  Jefferson Airplane.

We didn’t care about pop music. We were blues freaks.  Old, black and blues — those were our watchwords.   Embodied by Muddy Waters, James Cotton,  Son House, Big Mama Thornton.

There had been gate-crashing at the Newport Jazz Festival earlier in the summer, and a mini riot at a festival in California.  The University of Michigan president suggested we hold our event in the football stadium.  What, on Tartan Turf?

We wound up in a grassy field by North Campus.  About 15,000 people showed up.

Pianist Otis Spann, the master, played boogie woogie.  I never did talk to him, even though I was backstage a lot.  What was I going to say?   The man was old, and I was too shy to talk to anybody over 21.

I first heard the “changes” on Otis Spann’s piano playing.   The “chord changes” — the I/ IV/V chord progression of the blues.  I was a single-note player (clarinet/sax) who knew very little about chords (multiple notes played at the same time) until Spann’s music spelled it out for me.

“Spann’s Boogie,” the tune, was simple.  It was like skeletonized jazz.  I couldn’t miss the left-hand boogie woogie arpeggios (runs) and chords.

I aspired to be like Spann and the other old guys: authentic musicians who answered yes to “Do you gots the feeling?”

Let me hear you, do you gots the feeling?

That exhortation auto-repeated at the festival about every 15 minutes with the college bell tower.

Spann had the feeling.  He was 39.

He died the next year.

My response to that — worked out over the next several decades — was to learn the Jewish blues (klezmer) and slug seltzer.  Took me way past 40.   Klezmer and seltzer: both are fizzy and both cut right through the glop.   Seltzer, oh boy.

As Alan Sherman said:
“Bring me one scotch and soda.
Then you’ll take back the scotch, boy.
And leave the 2 cents plain.”

At a bar mitzvah bar, if you ask for “two cents plain” or seltzer,  you’ll get nowhere.  Ask for club soda.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/12/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup  plays the West Virginia Jewish Reunion 7 p.m. Sat., Aug. 16, Charleston, W. Va.

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