What is it about the Europeans and their fascination with the Blues? Some of the best American Blues artists today are making their living playing concerts and recording albums in Europe, and making occasional forays back into the United States to tour.
The Blues in its purest form has never really caught on here on mainstream radio. Oh sure, there have been brief upsurges in awareness when people like Dan Akroyd and John Belushi briefly popularized Chicago style electric Blues with their "Blues Brothers" personae. There have been other musicians who have managed to get air play and popularity playing the blues too, but to say it ever achieved its rightful place on the charts and in the hearts of North Americans would be wrong.
Initially there was the race problem, as Blues was primarily performed by black musicians and in the fifties and early sixties segregation in North America was much more pronounced than it is today. But even with white artists performing the music now, and a sizeable moneyed black audience with disposable income, neither population still seems inclined to give the music the support other forms of popular music receive.
Perhaps it's because in some ways Europe has more of a history of blues music as part of its mainstream culture than we have over here. That may sound odd to hear, but if you think about it for a bit it makes sense. In the 1920's all the nightclubs in Paris featured black American artists playing jazz and blues music. In those days, in the United States and Canada, there was as much chance of black bands playing outside of black bars as a Klan Grand Wizard being asked to sit in with George Clinton today.
After the six-year hiatus that was World War Two, the music scene picked up right where it left off and it's been chugging along ever since. Today one of the better Blues record labels is based out of Germany, Ruf records, and they produce some of the best Blues music from around the world. The impact of performances and recordings has been so great a whole generation of new Blues musicians has sprung up in Europe, with such "traditional" Blues hotbeds as Finland and the former Yugoslavia both producing young guitar players.
Mick Jaggar talked about how listening to the music of people like Lightening Hopkins and others helped shape the direction the Rolling Stones would take as a band. But these new players are not interested in simply being influenced, they want to be the sound of those guitars and sing those songs.
Now, as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself - but not too much. You see, in spite of the fact that the events took place in 1953; the recordings are just now being released to the public. On February 26th and 28th Big Bill Broonzy performed concerts in Amsterdam. These concerts had been recorded at the time, using the best sound equipment available, but the tapes had never been mastered let alone pressed into record.
What makes the quality of these tapes that much more superior than any equivalent live concert was the fact the man who recorded the concerts was a movie sound recorder, and later Dutch film producer and director Louis Van Gasteren. He used his film equipment. I have never heard a live recording from that time period where the sound is so impeccable. You can hear everything in perfect proportion down to the coughs and shuffles in the audience.
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