Okay, party animal, it's a Sunday afternoon in late July. With its
lissome chase of benevolent cottony patches across an opulently blue
overhead, it may be the most idyllic day of the year. You can glimpse
fragments of it through the small horizontal rect angles set high in
the subterranean walls of the West Strand Grill's "Downtown
Underground" as you soak in the loping progressions of a 12-bar blues
like a musical moloch.
Ian Bennett is guiding his saxophone through channels charted long ago
by James Brown as the other Blue Rays shape out the jib and keel for
this maiden voyage of the afternoon cruise. The tug of the rhythms
and nocturnal suggestiveness of the setting obscure, for a clock
stretch, the golden panorama of the sun-drenched marina that the cafe
out back overlooks. That clock has submerged in the wake of a
finishing kick by drummer Gary Schwartz and now there's only Bennett's
vocal launch into Texas Eddie's "Wait A Minute, Baby" over Robert
Bard's bassy downbeat and the settling in of your fellow
subterreanians. You notice a flow of people arriving with instruments
and the presence of seniors and grade school kids grooving into the
show. There's a crew from a Manhattan cable station setting up a
monitor, dancing couples and mixing singles to remind you what brought
you in from paradise. This is, as word has it, a "happening" scene.
Rich Colan, sitting in for the Blue Rays regular guitarist, Chris
Vitarello, warmed the waters with an automobile blues while Bennett
switched to mouth harp and melded some scrumptious short licks into
the breaks. Showing a taste for less common tunes, and blues history
is replete with solid b-sides and album-fillers begging for
retreatment, Bennett laced on Muddy Water's "Evil" for a snug fit and
the tapping toes of arriving jam-meisters were already twitching to
test the temperature of the pool, ready to swap strokes with the other
swimmers. This was underground networking with musical immediacy. A
horde of axes bristled in the audience, a couple of hatchets, some
swords. But all were honed to an edge of blues steel (strings) at a
well-trod entrance gate to contemporary music.
Ian Bennett grew up in the British farm country of Surrey and met the
late Gary Windo in Brighton.
"Gary was a very influential character," Bennett recalls. "I was in
the merchant navy and I used to take a record player out to sea with
me. Gary was on the same ship and we'd go out in different ports and
buy jazz records. Gary had a saxophone and we used to finish work and
go down in the holds. One of us would play for an hour while the
other did theory...I was about 21 when I heard John Coltrane and, of
course, I didn't realize just then what a true genius Coltrane was but
that's what kicked me into saying that's what I want to be."
After joining an r&b band in Queens when he moved over in the 1960's,
Bennett hooked his tenor and vocals into Jama, a group that played
mostly original material on Long Island. He was a ticket-ripper
living in a theater in West Hampton when Buzzwell recruited him to
toot upstate. "We were playing 6 or 7 nights a week in the '70's," he
noted. "That was a commercial band, so there was more demand for that
music. That was the only band I've been with where I didn't have to
do a day gig."
When you look at the Blue Rays' schedule, there's a lock-solid line of
fri-sat-sun bookings at widely-flung venues through the end of
October, beyond their regular jam-hosting in Kingston. With most of
them day-gigging all 5 weekdays, as well, it looks strenuous but, says
Bennett, "It's satisfying and that's good. It's like you're doing
something for the community in a sense. There are younger players who
want to learn the blues and this is a good venue for them to do that.
It's successful; one day we had 32 people sign up and sit in. Two
kids- one about 4 or 5 and his brother about 7 or 8- playing drums and
congas. They were awesome. We've got another 12-year-old kid comes
down and plays guitar...(and others he ran off, including the pros,
and new people every week)...It's healthy to see these young kids
channeling themselves to learn this music. It's a healing force and
God knows this planet needs to be healed. So, this is our way.
Personally, for me, I hear the blues and it takes away my problems,
troubles, and gives me a nice fresh feeling to keep on a roll, keep on
trying."
With the variance of ages, and especially the presence of
children, there is a sense of community here which is becoming scare
in an America where corporate strategies have dramatically diminished
real wage levels and parents are typically working longer hours than
they did decades ago. Watching the shared enjoyment of generations
here gives a sense of at least part of what is "happening" on this
afternoon.
Five years ago, David Futrelle wrote "If patriotism is, as they say,
the last refuge of scoundrels, then concern for "The Children" is
running a close second-to-last. Like The Flag, The Family, Our Troops
and other such abstract symbols of wholesome Americana. The Children
serve as many rhetorical and political uses as there are politicians
to invoke them."
It was to "protect the children" from nudity in slick magazines
catering to a male audience that a bill was passed to force them under
the counter and, many of them, out of existence. But, that was only
part of the story, as any investigative journalist could tell you.
They were also a venue for socially and politically vital articles too
"dangerous" for major media that paid enough to support the deep
research most larger markets were reluctant to sponsor and thus we
lost an important independent voice. (Note how citations of these
markets drop off in Carl Jensen's
20 Years of Censored News
after the ban). Today, it is again The Children being cited as
legislative moves are made to lock up the Internet before these
emerging freedoms of exchange become affordable to the mass lower
strata of unwashed minds.
Little girls danced with each other and boys gleamed at the stage as
the sign-on talent kept the beat. Young Chris O'Leary loosened up and
cut loose on harmonica, singing out some of his favorites as
slicksters and fledglings traded licks behind him and an "anything can
happen" feel drifted the room. O'Leary returned to back vocalist
Susan Linich with a bass after Pete Santora sandwiched a ripping
version of "My Babe" with slices of "Pledging My Time" ala the blues
standard and Dylan's take-off.
Santora, party animal and veteran performer in the Beatlemania shows
of the late 70's and early 80's, had glowing comments about the
previous night's outstanding Tom Pacheco show in Boiceville. Pacheco,
himself, observing America after a decade's stay in Dublin, had some
remarks relevant to the scene. He watched Ireland change dramatically
in 10 years from a "third world" economy to the best economy in Europe
and said the thing he liked best about the country was that its people
were so little influenced by media.
"People were out more, like they were in America years ago. They
weren't so cocooned in their houses as people have become in this
country," Pacheco commented. "Now, nightclubs don't do well in the
United States. People stay in glued to the tube. They're home and
isolated from one another where, there (in Ireland), each night
everybody's out in the pubs all the time and not just the men. It's
men, women, children, dogs, everything. So, there's a sense of being
with people more, being with human beings in a social setting, that
we've lost. There's a fear all over America keeping people inside.
We've lost a lot of freedoms here and, everyday, you see more erode."
Neil Eisenberg, Pacheco's keyboardist for that packed house on
Saturday night, noted that the lot of the musician in rural New York
changed drastically after the drinking age hiked to 21. A stringent
side effect of the DWI blitz has been its crushing effect on live
music and its replacement with television programming. But, the
biggest surprise of this bright afternoon was coming to a blues jam in
a dim downstairs room and finding a sense of community. Upstairs, the
restaurant's tv was tuned to the s teamrolling Yankees while Boss
Steinbrenner maneuvers for a new taxpayers' stadium with big money
corporate skyboxes and Rudolf, the mayor, takes time off from forcing
the disabled to work to drop into the broadcast booth to shine his
image. Downstairs was not an escape from reality but a different
reality. It was just us folks networking, meeting, interacting.
Musicians mapping out the terrain. People with more on their minds
than reaching for the chips and beer from the couch. Thomas Paine
wrote that society and government "are not only different, but have
different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government
by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively
by uniting our affections, the latter
negatively by restraining our vices."
Downstairs at the jam is more than a blues subculture zonking onto the
riffs in a basement. It's a trace of our wants, our desire for live
music, our united affections for life itself.
-Irv Yarg
Axes In The Audience