The hip museum financed by gambling, curated by a Violent Femme

Violent Femme, Brian Ritchie, curates MONA FOMA

We were recently in Tasmania, that one-time convict isle at the end of the earth that changed its name from Van Diemen’s Land in 1852 in an attempt to whitewash away the stain of its dark history.

Today, Tasmania is home to probably the hippest museum in the world, built on the winnings of one of the world’s top gamblers, a working class lad from Hobart called Dave Walsh. (Hobart, Tasmania, incidentally, was also the birthplace of that infamous Hollywood bad boy of the 1930s and 40s, the Australian actor and coke-on-the-end-of-the-penis fiend, Errol Flynn.)

The museum is named Mona, not a salute to the 1957 Bo Diddley classic, covered by the early Rolling Stones, but an acronym for Museum of Old and New Art. It is nearly twice the size of the Guggenheim museum in New York, costs $12 million a year to run and makes only $4 million annually in return, the balance being made up by the gambler Walsh.

Mona initially received international publicity in 2008 when it appointed the bass player of the Milwaukie alternative rock band Violent Femmes, Brian Ritchie, as curator of its annual music festival, MONA FOMA. Ritchie has since had a succession of top acts including John Cale, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Phillip Glass, Grandmaster Flash, PJ Harvey and David Byrne headlining the Mona festivals.

When we were there, Elvis Costello and the Imposters were performing. Sadly, though, Elvis wasn’t featuring his popular spinning wheel which selects, at random, each song to be played next. That, apparently is the show to see.

International visitors flock to the Mona museum in their thousands, making it Tasmania’s top tourist attraction. Because of Mona, the Lonely Planet travel guide listed Hobart as one of world’s top ten cities to visit in 2013.

Mona’s bizarre exhibits range from 151 sculptures of women’s vaginas to the remains of a suicide bomber cast in chocolate. It prides itself in stretching the limits of taste. If ever you’re over in that neck of the woods, Mona is well worth a visit.



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Alexis Korner: the Godfather of British Blues

BLUESMUSE 30

As a young lad, probably too young to drink, if the truth be known, I used to luxuriate in the bath listening to the chocolate-brown tones of Alexis Korner before going out to down voracious pints.

The great man had a blues show on BBC radio on Sunday evenings and, boy, did he know his stuff, which was understandable given his background.

Korner's Blues Incorporated band, which he formed in 1961 with the English blues harmonica legend, Cyril Davies, featured such up and coming blues and rock luminaries as Ginger Baker, Long John Baldry, Graham Bond, Eric Burdon, Jack Bruce, Charlie Watts and Ronnie and Art Woods (Ronnie’s brother), to name a few. Young fans who often joined Korner on stage included Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Paul Jones and Manfred Mann, Steve Marriott, John Mayall, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Keith Richards and Rod Stewart. That’s how important Korner was to the development of British rock. When his later band, CCS, covered Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, it became the TV theme tune to Top of the Pops for the next ten years.

Alexis Korner

But Alexis Korner had a double life. When I returned to London to work in an advertising agency in 1980, I was making a TV commercial with an art director who suggested Alexis Korner as the voice-over. I nearly fell off my chair. I discovered that not only was Alexis Korner also a voice-over artist, he was one of the most in-demand voice-overs in British television and radio advertising. His rich and plummy baritone tones had starred in hundreds of commercials, many of them famous. The art director didn't even know Korner was a musician.

 If you’ve ever heard the former head of the British Army, General Sir Mike Jackson speak, that’s a bit how Alexis Korner sounded. But Korner’s voice had even more whisky and cigarettes-style gravel in it than the General’s, and Korner's vowels were even more polished. As they say up north, he were reet posh.

No other Englishman did as much for British blues as Alexis Korner. He brought many American blues greats over to London, put them up, and played and recorded with most of them including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Jimi Henrix. But even though he sounded like an English aristocrat, Alexis Korner wasn’t even a natural-born Englishman (with apologies to Humble Pie). Korner was born in Paris in 1928 to an Austrian-Jewish father and a Greek-Turkish mother, which is just another example of how so many different nationalities have consistently contributed to the development of the blues.

After living in Switzerland and North Africa Alexis Korner arrived in London at the beginning of World War Two aged 12. There, upon hearing blues for the first time while listening to the radio during the racket of a German bombing raid, he was hooked for life. 

There’s a chapter devoted to World War Two blues in ‘How Blues Evolved Volume Two’.

one of two illustrated histories of the blues at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved+volume+one

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Sadly, Alexis Korner died far too young in 1984, aged 55.

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King Bolden and the earliest known African-American guitarists

BLUESMUSE29.

Until the 1890s, when mail order catalogues made them more affordable and improved roads and rail links made musical instruments more accessible, guitars were mainly a preserve of the American middle classes.

Most were much smaller than the guitars we know today, probably because they were mostly played by women. Perhaps that’s why they were (and still are) known as parlor or parlour guitars, because women played them to entertain guests, usually in the parlour. Even so, parlour guitars were also the guitars most early African-American players used in the days before their folk music became known as blues.

Buddy Bolden band c. 1903. 
Jefferson Mumford's on guitar.

But, as mentioned, very few African Americans could afford such instruments. Two exceptions could be found onthe streets of New Orleans in the 1880s. Both were working barbers, the fall-back career of so many musicians in those early days. The ground-breaking guitar pair was Charlie Galloway, born in New Orleans around 1863, and Jefferson Mumford, born in 1870. What style of music they played around 1885 is debatable but, by the 1890s, both were known to be working in New Orleans playing ragtime, blues’ direct forerunner. 

Charlie Galloway, the elder of of the pair, was leading an African-American string band around 1895 when he decided to spice things up by adding a line of brass - an innovative step that inadvertently helped give birth to jazz. One of his new black recruits was a 19-year fellow Charlie, and yet another barber, a cornet player called Charlie Bolden. Young 'Kid' Bolden, nicknamed Buddy, proved so innovative and inspirational, he soon took over leadership of Galloway’s band. After changing its name to the Buddy Bolden band, it became the hottest outfit in New Orleans. Not that guitarist Charlie Galloway was forced out. He still had an important part to play.

With guitar amplifiers not invented until the 1930s, it was then impossible for acoustic guitars to be heard over the rest of the band. What acoustic guitars could do, however, was lay down a solid rhythmic foundation over which the horns could improvise. And so, the chord-strumming rhythm guitarist was born, a feature still with us today. Explained, author Harry O. Brun in his 1960 book, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

“It was he (the guitarist) who would shout out the chord changes on unfamiliar melodies or on modulations to a different key. It was through this frequent ‘calling out’ of chords by the guitarist that many New Orleans musicians of that day, otherwise totally ignorant of written music, came to recognize their chords by letter and number; and though they could not read music, they always knew the key in which they were playing.”

Charlie Galloway would eventually be replaced by that other guitarist from the 1880s, Jefferson Mumford, who was with Bolden during the glory years from 1897 to about 1905 when Kid Bolden got upgraded to King Bolden.

As students of jazz and blues will know, Buddy Bolden was the rock star of his day, one of the first known to overindulge on booze, women, sex and drugs; and also the first musician known to go into a trance when playing. Aged just 29, he was committed to an insane asylum in 1907 where he died in 1931, unheralded and unrecorded.

On a more academic note, Wikipedia reports that Bolden is also credited with discovering or even inventing the so-called ‘Big Four’, a key rhythmic innovation on the marching band beat, which gave embryonic blues and jazz musicians much more room for individual improvisation. As the renowned New Orleans trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, explains, “the Big Four was the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. The second half of the Big Four is the pattern commonly known as the habanera rhythm, one of the most basic rhythmic cellsin Afro-Latin and sub-Saharan African music”. 
Remembered Duke Ellington in the 1950s, “Buddy Bolden was a suave, handsome and a debonair cat who the ladies loved. He had the biggest, fattest trumpet sound in town. He bent notes to the nth degree. He used to tune up in New Orleans and break glasses in Algiers.”

Another influential New Orleans figure in early ragtime, blues and jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, later immortalised Buddy Bolden in song. Jelly Roll wrote the song, ‘I Thought I heard Buddy Bolden Say’, as a fox trot in 1939; but it has always been known as ‘Buddy Bolden’s Blues’. You might recognise the track from Hugh Laurie’s 2011 album of New Orleans blues classics, ‘Let Them Talk’. 

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Is this where blues really started?

BLUESMUSE28. 
How many blues lovers have wondered how this intriguing music of ours first gained its unique sound? As much as I tried, I could never see how the nuances of blues related to the frenetic music of old tribal Africa, no matter how many documentaries and music histories told me it did.

About ten years ago, I had a revelation. I was watching The Chariots of Ancient Libya, a documentary by the excellent Australian film maker, David Adams. In this documentary, Adams filmed local Libyan tribesmen playing, on ancient instruments, a music that seemed remarkably similar to blues. To me, this was the key to the highway, so to speak.

What I discovered, inspired me to research the blues even further, ultimately ending up with the illustrated history, How Blues Evolved.

Since I started on this blues quest, a growing body of academic evidence has emerged to back up what I heard on Adams' film (these academic sources are detailed in the book). This evidence suggests the true origins of the blues lay in the parts of Africa touched by Islam and you only have to hear for yourself the traditional music of the Tuareg people of North Africa to appreciate its uncanny correlation with some of the earliest recorded rural blues.

The Tuareg are not Arabs but Berbers, and known as the Blue Men of the Desert, due to their indigo blue robes and wrap-around headwear. This is nothing to do with how blues got its name, I believe, and is purely coincidental.

Tuareg slave traders taking their captives across the Sahara.

Traditionally living between the Arabs of northern Africa and the Negroid peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, Tuareg warriors had traditionally hunted-down and traded in black slaves since Roman times. For 600 years, until the very end of the nineteenth century, the Tuareg were the undisputed masters of North Africa’s slave trade, controlling and protecting their network of north-west African trade routes across the Sahara, and guarding and protecting the many slave markets in desert towns.

While they also traded in gold, perfume, dates and spices, perhaps half of the Tuareg’s trafficking was human, with slaves forced to walk hundreds of miles, fastened in head-yokes, to the old slave warehouses of modern-day Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Benin, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Sierra Leone.

   It’s not difficult to imagine the wretched captive audiences of slaves dejectedly listening to the hypnotic music emanating from the Tuareg camp fires through the cold desert night. Just how much the songs of the Tuareg slave traders influenced the music of the 645,000 African slaves transported to North America no one can ever know. But it is becoming increasing evident that such Tuareg music did influence the earliest sounds of the blues.

A modern twist to this tale is the electric-guitar-driven-sound of the modern-day Tuareg band, Tinariwen, made up of Tuareg musicians from the desert region of Mali. Formed in 1979, 

Another old print of Tuareg slave hunters.

Tinariwen won the Best World Music Award at last year’s Grammys. Due to the nomadic nature of their people, band members tend to be an inter-changing collective rather than the same musicians.

While Tinariwen's early influences were Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, etc, the Berber band members have always said categorically that they never heard authentic American blues until they started touring internationally in 2001.

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Perhaps the earliest known blues performer ever

BluesMuse27

Long ago, when I played rugby, there was an old boy nicknamed Daddy Stovepipe. Daddy was a human dynamo still turning out every week and tackling, ferociously, anything that moved in shorts. Daddy did this well into his late 50s before arthritis cut short his career and confined him to a wheelchair. Was his arthritis a result of his rugby playing? Who knows, but one thing was for sure, people said, Daddy Stovepipe would have played for England except that World War Two interrupted his prime playing years. This might just give you a clue as to how long ago it was.

Anyway, I always though Daddy Stovepipe was an odd name; but only when researching my book, How Blues Evolved, did I become aware that Daddy Stovepipe was originally the name of an old African-American blues performer, reaching about as far back in history as old blues performers go.

Daddy Stovepipe 1867 - 1963

We know the original Daddy Stovepipe, born Johnny Watson in 1867 in Mobile, Alabama, played in a mariachi band in Mexico in the late 1890s. Obviously supremely versatile, Watson would certainly be the earliest blues performers ever known, if only we knew the exact genre of music he was playing in America before his Mexican sojourn. Unfortunately we don't know.

As well as Daddy Stovepipe, Johnnie Watson also recorded under the names of Jimmy Watson, Sunny Jim and the Reverend Alfred Pitts. He cut his first record, ‘Sundown Blues’, in Richmond, Indiana, in early 1924 aged 57. It is thought to be the third-ever country blues captured on record. 

Johnny ‘Daddy Stovepipe’ Watson’s last record was made in 1960, at the grand old age of 93 and he died three years later aged 96. His nickname was due to the stovepipe hat that he always wore.

The puzzling thing is, somebody in middle England must have known of this old blues player’s existence way back in the 1940s when a young English rugby player called David Stovell acquired the most unusual of nicknames: Daddy Stovepipe. 

People who know about blues turn up in the most unexpected places, don't they?

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