AIGF - Bending The Blues @ TheFestival Theatre, Adelaide(03/12/08)

Mon 8th Dec, 2008 in Gig Reviews

For Bending The Blues, the Adelaide International Guitar Festival brought together three acts to present a contemporary take on the blues. The motivation, one suspects, was to exhibit how the genre continues to evolve with the generations, despite its portrayal in the mainstream media as antiquated “woke up this morning, clunkety-clunk-clunk” stuff, or that menacing dirge popular among the bearded, leather-waistcoated fraternity. However, a theatre show at the price of an haute cuisine meal wasn’t going to convert anyone – those at the Festival Theatre were fans when they bought their tickets. What it did achieve, though, was an interesting debate amongst the generations about what can be considered blues.

Evolving styles are not necessarily an artistic advance; there are often more practical reasons. As blues artists struggle to compete with the profits brought by pokies, they must contemporise if they are to attract new audiences and, in turn, convince venues to give them gigs. Some even refrain from using the B-word to avoid being presumptuously labelled, preferring the less-committal “roots” tag.

One artist who’s proud to call herself a blueswoman is Victoria’s Fiona Boyes. With her earthy vocals, world-class finger-picking skills and song-writing, Boyes dominated the Melbourne blues scene before winning hearts and high acclaim across the US. As the opening act, she represented a traditional electric-blues style and that, accompanied by the width of her repertoire – Delta, swing, Chicago, ragtime, Texas, and more – and the vivacity with which she and the Fortune Tellers played it, won her lots of warm applause and trade at the merch table.

The Backsliders, also, eschew the roots tag, preferring “delta-blues wall of sound,” which is as fitting a description as any. Dom Turner’s over-driven steel guitar and Rob Hirst’s hyper-bombastic drumming wield a blues that is much louder, much more raucous, than blues-inspired rock acts like The White Stripes and The Black Keys. From Turner’s resonator came menacing voodoo-blues sounds that conjured images of a bad moon rising over a fog-laden bayou; while Hirst provided the sound of your heart drumming as you feared what lurked beneath. Middle-aged men overheard in the foyer during the interval complained that they couldn’t hear the harp of The Backsliders’ special guest, Ian Collard, over Hirst’s maniacal pounding. Others muttered that it was “awful noise” and “rubbish”. For those more accustomed to volume, however, Turner’s outstanding slide-guitar skills were never lost amongst the ferocity. Nor were Collard’s dirty-sweet harp tones, though he did have to play like a man with three lungs.

On his first trip to Australia, Grammy-nominated guitarist and bandleader, Derek Trucks, journeyed through a vast array of blues styles, from boogie to Chicago, Southern-fried rockers to soulful ballads, all the while incorporating myriad influences, including jazz, classical, even Indian, guitar sounds. There were glimpses of the legendary stringers who have influenced him, including Duane Allman and Eric Clapton, but Trucks’ style is unmistakably his own. Alongside a five-piece band that ought to be a world-class act in its own right, including the beautifully sweet-and-sour vocals of Mike Mattison, Trucks took the dominant role normally occupied by the singer. His inventiveness, his gift for weaving seamlessly between rhythm and lead, and his ability not to stray into self-indulgent wailings, made for one awesome, blistering solo after another.

The blues is often too easily relegated to the past-tense file, but it is the root of popular music, and its longest-enduring form. It continues to evolve, as it did from the cotton fields of Mississippi to Chicago, from Chicago to London and back again, and on around the world. Trucks’ influences genuinely warrant the roots tag – they’re simply too diverse to categorise. But it is his initiative and virtuosity that will inspire another generation of blues musicians, just as Allman and Clapton inspired his. Anyone who wasn’t impressed should be given a blanket and shown to a comfy chair to see out their days watching endless re-runs of Midsomer Murders.