The Blues is Alive!
Last saturday, I managed to pop by the One Way in the early evening with my 7 year old son Corentin. The One Way is a dingy but lovable bar in the heart of the St Ouen flea market. They have mostly blues acts playing there, it's rarely crowded but they know how to pick the good stuff. On Saturday Greg Szlacpzynski was playing there with Ian Siegal, and since I like both of their stuff and had never seen Ian live I thought it was worth the hassle to get there.
I missed the entire first set and arrived just at the intermission. But at the moment Ian and Greg walked on stage I knew this was going to be great. In fact, it was so amazing that I'm still trying to analyse what I saw that night.
Now as I said, I've known Greg for a good while and I've seen him play many times. I love his inventiveness, the fact that he will go out of his way to make something that could sound very derivative different. I also love his songwriting. And to tell you truth, I wasn't sure how good a fit these guys together were. Ian, after all, sounds very old-timey, especially acoustic.
But it was a good fit, a great fit at times, and Greg did manage to sound different and yet fit stylistically most of the time (there were a few odd passages, a little too "out there" for trad blues, but I put that down mostly on very little rehearsing...) Great as Greg sounded though, and not meaning any disrespect to him, Ian was the man that night.
Ian blew me away. And made me understand, retrospectively, why most of the modern blues bores me, and why these old guys on scratchy records can sometimes get me close to tears. Fire. This man has fire. He's not playing the music. He is the music, he's radiating the music. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but I imagine this is the kind of magnetic fascination that some of these old blues guys exerted on their audience, and a little of that carried over on these scratchy records.
Ian and Greg were playing about half-covers and half originals, but it didn't matter. Ones felt just as true, as real as the others. Ian, when he plays, lives the music he's playing. What he's singing is him, there's no distance at all between him as a musician and the music he's playing.
I think it's inevitable that the vast majority of people who play blues these days are dissociated
from the material they play, not just because of experience but because music has become a performance. Musicians are performers. And that's as true of guys not making a decent living out of playing blues as it is of American Idol alumni. This is what the business is about.
But it's not how Ian plays and sings. He plays and sings as if there was no audience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he's distanced from the audience or arrogant or anything. Quite the contrary. But you get the feeling that he plays with such intensity because this is him, not because the audience is there.
Quite stunning. I strongly encourage you to check out his new album Swagger and if you want a taste of what Saturday night sounded like, you can always check a recent MMM that featured his song Mortal Coil Shuffle.
And if you're very patient, you can sift through the 108 photos of the show (95 of which were taken by my 7 year old son) here.
Oh, and to top the day, my son loved it.
