“The blues ain’t goin’ anywhere.” Not if Jontavious Willis has anything to do with it.

The blues is dead is a phrase you occasionally hear. It’s also the title of a song on Spectacular Class, an album of timeless acoustic blues, released a few months ago by 22-year-old Jontavious Willis, who hails from Greenville, Georgia. Importantly, though, Jontavious’s song title has a question mark and this hugely gifted artist uses the song to disabuse us of any notion that the blues have passed their sell by date. Such talk just makes him “scratch my head.” Jontavious knows that “the blues ain’t goin’ anywhere, the blues been around for a great long time,” As long as people have “situations and problems on their mind,” the blues ain’t going anyway. So, “stop with that foolish talk.”

Once you listen to this talented young man, who has delivered an album that sounds at once traditional but at the same time entirely fresh, with an outstanding set of songs driven by his top-notch guitar picking and his hugely entertaining vocals, you realize that the blues are nowhere near dead. In the hands of Jontavious Willis, the future of the blues is secure.

And that’s the opinion of the legendary Taj Mahal, who said, “That’s my Wonderboy, the Wunderkind. Jontavious is a great new voice of the 21st century in the acoustic blues.” Keb’ Mo’ too has recognized his talent, working with him in the recording of Spectacular Class and taking him on tour with him.

Like many other musicians, Willis grew up singing in church from an early age, encouraged by his grandfather. He started playing guitar when he was fourteen and five years later was playing on stage with Taj Mahal. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, an excellent song writer, a talented guitarist and a hugely entertaining performer.

And, he’s a nice guy. As I found out when I got the chance to chat to him one day recently during his busy US tour.

Gary Congratulations on the new album, Spectacular Class. It’s terrific, it was one of our best albums of 2019 so far, in the list that we did a couple of months ago. It’s had a great reception, been very well received. I guess you’ve been pleased about that?

Jontavious Oh most definitely. It’s been great and I’m proud of it. We did a good job and worked hard and now I’m very proud of it.

Gary Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the making of it. Both Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal have been involved I gather.

Jontavious Yes. Keb’ was strongly involved. But you know, I think it took us two, maybe three days to make it. And it was real easy. Keb’ made it real nice. He was very easy to work with.  My first album, I did it all by myself and it was a lot harder. Keb’ taught me a lot of things in the studio. We did it in three days and it was good. I wrote all the songs, Yeah, it was fantastic.

Gary What sort of things do you think you learned from Keb Mo’?

Jontavious I learned a lot of technical things, a lot about the board, more about how to get different sounds, and mixing and mastering. I learned more about the other side of things, not just the performance aspect, mixing sound and making the record.

Gary And Taj Mahal has made some very nice comments about you?

Jontavious Yeah that’s my buddy! Yeah, Taj, he e-mailed me almost every other week.

Gary That’s fantastic. Because he’s a legend really, isn’t he?

Jontavious Oh yeah, and he’s also a great person and a great mentor. Aside from being legendary, he’s just a great man in general.

Gary So how did you come in contact with him?

Jontavious I met Taj in August 2015. We had a mutual friend and he’d seen a video of mine that was posted on YouTube. He enjoyed it and he had a show in Atlanta and invited me to come there and play two songs for him. And the rest is history!

Gary So he liked it.

Jontavious Yeah, he liked it. He called me up on stage – that was the first time I played for a pretty large crowd. It looked like it was two thousand people out there. I’m not sure how many. There was a lot of people there.

Gary Did that make you feel a bit nervous?

Jontavious Well I was more nervous that Taj was sitting beside me than I was with all the people! He didn’t leave the stage. When I played, he stayed right there, his hand patting on his leg while I was playing, so that made me nervous.

Gary So no pressure!

Jontavious No, and I never encountered pressure ever again after that day!

Gary Fantastic. I gather you’ve played a few shows with Keb’ Mo’ in the last couple of months. How has that been?

Jontavious It’s been great. Yeah, I played a few. He gave me 45 minutes, you hone in on how many songs it takes to, you know, complete it. It sharpened me up pretty good and I get to always check out what Mr. Keb’ is doing. That’s always a pleasure. And just hanging out with him. I always enjoy just talking to people more so than anything, just talking to people and getting to spend quality time not just strictly music, but getting to know each other.

Gary That’s very cool. You have a great song on Spectacular Class called The Blues is Dead? It’s a proposition that you clearly don’t agree with! What sort of blues particularly appeals to you?

Jontavious I have an appetite for music in general but I love all different styles of blues. I don’t go out with a band, but I tell people I enjoy blues from the ‘20s to the late ‘50s. That’s  about my span with blues. I enjoy Chicago blues from Tampa Red to Muddy Waters. But yeah, it’s all around. The only thing about playing solo is you don’t have to worry about missing anybody else if you want to change the tempo. If you want to do what you want to do, you can do it. You don’t have to worry about messing up your bandmates.

Gary And are you finding that out there there’s a real appetite for the sort of traditional acoustic blues that you’re playing?

Jontavious Yes most definitely. People are enjoying it. And I try my best to deliver it in a way that’s enjoyable not just, you know, something nostalgic. I try to bring something new to the table, at the same time while being true to what I love and the music.

Gary Yeah, I think you get that sense when you listen to the album, Jontavious. Obviously, it’s very traditional in one sense, but there’s something very fresh and modern about it and there’s a good sense of fun coming through as well.

Jontavious Oh yeah, most definitely. I think it’s a big misconception that the blues, traditional blues, has to be not really engaging or interesting, but you know there are so many different elements. There’s a lot to do with just knowing the history of the music and being from the area of the culture, just knowing that there are so many different aspects of blues. I try to get those points across. Blues is not just sad. It’s happy, it’s angry, every emotion.

Gary So what is it do you think about this music which has been around for such a long time that still resonates with people today?

Jontavious Well for me, being from the south, from where it originated and being around the people that it originated from, it’s always been the truth. And I always have enjoyed the truth. And so that’s my main thing about the blues. People telling a story just like it is – not sugar coating it. I started out in the church and that was a different truth, so I always enjoy any music that represents truth.

Gary Well now that you mentioned that you grew up singing in the church, how important is that background for you both musically and maybe personally?

Jontavious Oh, very important. I learned almost everything I know about music in church. I didn’t know it at the time but I found out about being able to read a crowd. Being able to learn timing, being able to know different phrasing. You know how to present a song and actually be a great performer of a song. Making people feel like they are part of the song and a part of your performance. All of that became instrumental in my music career and my life. So, I learned a lot. It was also communal, going to church was communal. Singing was communal. I always felt better when I was singing in church with my grandpa…I started singing behind my granddaddy.

Gary Fantastic. Now tell us a bit about your guitar playing. You’ve got that highly rhythmical country blues picking down to a fine art. How did you get started playing the guitar and how did you how did you get good?

Jontavious Well I started playing guitar when my dad bought me a guitar on December twenty four 2010.  I just started playing – that’s pretty much it! And I kept on doing it, that was basically it. I’d listen to records sometime.

Gary Did you use Youtube videos or did you just listen to records?

Jontavious No I didn’t use YouTube videos because I didn’t play in standard tuning until about 4 years ago. I was playing in alternate tunings. Ever since I learned, playing guitar was what I wanted to do with myself

Gary Very good. So, you just experimented yourself and taught yourself.

Jontavious Yeah that’s it.

Gary I understand you play other instruments as well.

Jontavious Yeah, I play a little bit of harmonica and a little banjo. Not much.

Gary Very good. And Jontavious, you’re a graduate of Colombus State University I understand. What did you graduate in by the way?

Jontavious I had a B.A. in Social Science.

Gary OK. And you’ve obviously decided to make a career out of performing and recording. So, what’s the what’s the attraction of the uncertainties of life as a musician over getting a steady job as a as a graduate?

Jontavious Well I mean I’m a go with the flow kind of guy! And I have been living off music comfortably very well and I’m making more now than I would be otherwise!

Gary So you going to stick with it!

Jontavious If there ever comes a time when I have to make tough decisions I’m always ready! But it seems like It has been doing well. So, I will let the universe take care of itself.

Gary So how are you enjoying life on the road so far?

Jontavious Oh I love it. Every minute of it. I see something different every time and I’m meeting new people. Every almost every town I go in I’ve got a friend. So it’s amazing.

Gary That’s fantastic. And you have a busy schedule of touring over the next few months?

Jontavious Yes I do. Currently I have l think four more shows in the States. And then and end of the month I do Norway, Switzerland and Denmark.          And then up next month sometime I get back on the road with Keb’. And yes, I’m happy.

Gary Very cool. Jontavious, thank you so much for talking to us. It’s been great talking to you all the best.

 

 

Richard Thompson at the Ulster Hall: 7 Things We Learned

“The finest rock songwriter after Dylan and the best electric guitarist since Hendrix.” Los Angeles Times.

Richard Thompson, looking fit and healthy, gave a rousing solo acoustic performance in the rather grand surroundings of Belfast’s Ulster Hall, getting a standing ovation from the delighted audience. He’s an iconic figure, featuring on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” winning a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association in Nashville, several Grammy nominations and an OBE.

He was part of the English folk-rock band, Fairport Convention in the late 60s and early 70s before launching a successful period with Linda Thompson and then his solo career, which has seen him release 18 studio albums and play with a who’s who list of major rock artists and his songs covered by artists like Emmylou Harris, David Gilmour and The Blind Boys from Alabama, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, and Don Henley. His 18^th album, 13 Rivers was released in 2018 to great acclaim.

Here’s what we learned:

1. A Richard Thompson concert is far from old minor key English folk songs and sea shanties. Yes, there’s folk, but with a huge variety of styles and tempos, and some full-blooded rock’n roll too, all peppered with self-deprecating banter and humour. It makes for a fine evening’s entertainment.

2. Sometimes you need more than three chords and the truth. And with Richard Thompson, you get a kaleidoscope of chords, runs, fills, arpeggios, harmonics and more, in a virtuoso display of guitar playing that will have your jaw dropping and your foot a-tapping.

3. Who needs a band, when you play bass, chords and lead, all at the same time, with great attack and panache to accompany your impressive vocal performance?

4. Lowden acoustic guitars “are the best out there, if you ask me,” said Thompson, praising the highly acclaimed Northern Irish luthiers. On the evidence of this masterful display of guitar wizardry, there can’t be much argument.

5. It’s great to have a trademark – in Richard Thompson’s case, his black beret, which he hasn’t taken off since 1984 (just joking!). His other trademark, of course, is his terrific song-writing skills, aptly demonstrated in song after song from each decade of his long career. Musically rich and lyrically clever, with wit, sarcasm, and great story-telling, the songs’ music and lyrics interweave powerfully.

6. Forty and fifty-year-old songs can still be magical. Thompson’s Bright Lights which “brushed the lower regions of the Top 40” in 1974, along with Dimming of the Day and Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes, all stirred great memories and were warmly received by the enthusiastic Belfast crowd. Songs that stand the test of time.

7. In your 8^th decade, you can still look fit and robust and give nearly two hours of fabulous entertainment, singing and playing your heart out. It helps, clearly, if you play tennis and cricket regularly.

Oh, and the sweet, sweet voice and song writing talents of Katherine Priddy who was the evening’s support deserves a mention. One to keep an eye on.

 

 

 

The blues, honesty and truth

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“The blues is the truth,” said Willie Dixon, famously. “The blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.”

One the one hand, the blues have always been entertainment, music to dance to, but it’s essentially music that is rooted in hard times, trouble and suffering. Which Dixon understood well. Born in Vicksburg in 1915 in a household of 14 children, his family lived in what he described as a “raggedy” house. Even worse was where he ended up aged eleven after running away from home – “man, you’re talking about a shack… the house [I stayed] in had great big holes in the floor.” Trying to steal some fixtures from an old derelict house got him sent to a jail-farm when he was twelve where he said, “That’s when I really learned about the blues. I had heard ’em with the music and took ’em to be an enjoyable thing but after I heard these guys down there moaning and groaning these really down-to-earth blues…I really began to find out what the blues meant to black people.”

On another occasion, for a petty charge, Dixon served thirty days at the Harvey Allen County Farm, near the infamous Parchman Farm prison, where the treatment of prisoners was inhumane – “this was the first time I saw a man beat to death,” he said. Dixon himself was brutalized, receiving a blow to his head that made him deaf for about four years. Dixon, in short, knew all about the truth of the blues.

Early blues songs covered the whole gamut of real-life problems and hardships faced by black communities – ill-health, poverty, homelessness, discrimination, police brutality, as well as the vagaries of romantic love. Here’s Victoria Spivey with TB Blues, tuberculosis being a disease particularly associated with poverty:

There’s no hiding from the realities of life with the blues. As slide guitarist Bryn Haworth told me recently, “Blues music to me is honest music. It’s people expressing their sorrow, their pain, their loneliness, their disconnectedness, their questions or anger about things we all feel…It’s honest…honest to God music, really.”

The blues face life head on, honestly, and somehow, often seem to enable a way through, because of that honesty. Honesty, however, seems to be a quality in short supply these days.

Tell the Truth, written by Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton, was recorded by Derek and the Dominos in August 1970, and appeared on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Whitlock has described it as a kind of coming of age song, a reminiscence about getting older, but as you listen to the lyrics today, it sounds like a social commentary on the descent of today’s world into double-speak and deceit:

Tell the truth.
Tell me who’s been fooling you?
Tell the truth.
Who’s been fooling who?

It doesn’t matter just who you are,
Or where you’re going or been…

The whole world is shaking now. Can’t you feel it?

Back in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 was published under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, and portrays a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Orwell said he was worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Would he have been surprised at where we have reached in today’s world, where the bare-faced lie has become perfectly acceptable and truth in the public sphere scarcely seems to matter?

Robert Musil, the author of the classic The Man Without Qualities in the mid-1930s, wrote, “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” And yet here we are. Donald Trump is in the White House, telling more lies each day than you wash your hands (according to CNN, June 2019) – as of June 7 2019, his 869th day in office, the president had made 10,796 false or misleading claims, according to Washington Post’s the Fact Checker’s database. And UK Tories have just installed Boris Johnson as the country’s Prime Minister, a man with a long and well-documented history of playing fast and loose with the truth (as reported by the Independent) – from his days as a journalist with the Times and the Daily Telegraph to backing the infamous claim on the side of the bus that the UK was sending £350m a week to the EU, followed by “let’s fund our NHS instead” during the Brexit referendum campaign.

As Roger Cohen put it recently, “The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. Johnson does a grotesque Churchill number. Nobody cares. The wolves have it; the sheep, transfixed, shrug.”

Of all the disturbing aspects of the rise of petty nationalism and populism which has given rise to racism, xenophobia and increasing polarisation, it is the assault on truth which is perhaps the most undermining of life as we know it. I watched a clip on an US TV programme recently where a woman was asked about Trump’s recorded statement that he could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot someone without losing any voters, and she dismissed it out of hand as “fake news” from the dishonest media. Up is down; black is white; I only believe what fits my viewpoint.

But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator, famously observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That has become almost quaint, so far down the road have we come. Johnson and Trump do not exist in a vacuum; the dishonesty which pervades public life at the highest levels seeps out through elements of the media into the public square and into the lives of individuals. Truth has become devalued and our societies imperilled because of it. As the ancient prophets of Israel said, “Truth has stumbled in the street” (Isaiah 59.14) and “lies and not truth prevail in the land” (Jeremiah 9.3).

We’re grateful for courageous reporters, broadcasters, church leaders and others who speak truth to power, expose lying and call out dishonest leadership. And with a continuous stream of properly fake news, we need to take care what we are prepared to believe. As psychologist Jordan Peterson says, “The small sins of the individual culminate into the great sins of the state.”

Dishonesty is a temptation for us all. Fyodor Dostoevsky warns us in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that not to tell the truth risks us losing our sense of reality. To lose the truth is to lose your soul. “Above all,” says Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima, “don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

Lies and deceit eat away at the fabric of our being. They are truly destructive, each lie causing a little more damage to our characters, until we can scarcely tell truth from untruth.

On the other hand, when you tell the truth, “Everything begins to come together…when you’re around someone who tells the truth everything comes together and that’s the potential destiny of the world…you can bring forth something again to paradise by speaking the truth and you can start in your own life, and in the lives of your own family…It’s the proper way of wending your way through the terrible world without making it worse than it already is and with the possibility perhaps of making it better.”

Someone famously said, “Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth – to see it as it is, and tell it like it is – to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.” Words to live by – despite the salutary fact that this came from Richard Nixon on the occasion of his acceptance of the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1968. The danger of ignoring the advice writ large.

More importantly, two thousand years ago, someone said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” As we discover in the authenticity of the blues, there is something about truth telling that does indeed set us free. Something about facing the realities of the world and our troubles face-on that is the first step to freedom. There’s a deeper freedom than that, though – as a provincial governor found out a long time ago when he faced his prisoner and asked, “What is truth?” There was no answer because the living embodiment of that was standing in front of him.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (Gospel of St. John)