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Blues music for harmonica great Charlie Musselwhite is a celebration. His approach to playing “comes out of the blues clubs of Chicago, where it was a good time with dancing, a party,” he explains. “A lot of people hear the term blues and think it’s something sad, but it’s really to get rid of that feeling. It’s a good time, a celebration of living.”
Last year, this revered musician finally won his first Grammy for a smoking-hot collaboration with Ben Harper on the album “Get Up!”
“It was really great,” he says about winning. “And it was really great that my friend Cyndi Lauper was the presenter. She was more excited than anybody.”
The album received rave reviews. Rolling Stone praised: “One of the thrills of ‘Get Up!’ is hearing Harper rock on hard blues. This kind of music is meat for Musselwhite.” The UK’s BBC noted: “If a case needs to be made for blues music in the mainstream, this meeting of crack talents from two generations fits the brief.” And PopMatters lauded: “The collaboration is at its best when the two kick up the tempo. ‘Believe’ even evokes a hint of Led Zeppelin with the electricity of both guitar and harmonica.”
It was a friend, blues legend John Lee Hooker, who first suggested that Musselwhite and Harper collaborate on a blues album.
“Our paths kept crossing,” Musselwhite explains. “I first met Ben when he opened for John Lee Hooker. John had asked me to play with him that night, and not long after that John was doing an album, ‘Best of Friends’ (released in 1998), where each tune featured another musician he knew. The tune ‘Burning Hell’ had Ben and his band and I backing up John Lee. It went so well, we really locked in. Even John Lee said, ‘Man you guys should record more together.’ We kept talking about it over the years, but we were both so busy. Finally we found the time and when we walked into the studio it was like wild horses busting out. The music just poured out. Some of the tunes were just one or two takes. On the last tune you can hear me laughing and talking because I didn’t even know we were recording. I thought we were just messing around.”
The two musicians are already deep into a follow-up.
“We have another one in the can,” he reveals. “It’s over half done, but it will probably be a year before it comes out.”
Besides recording with Harper, in recent years Musselwhite has played on Boz Scaggs’ album “Memphis,” Lauper’s “Memphis Blues,” and in 2014, Cat Stevens’ “Tell ‘Em I’m Gone.”
Born in rural Mississippi, this veteran musician was exposed to blues from an early age. When he moved to Memphis, Tenn., as a young teenager he began picking up techniques from musicians like Will Shade, a founding member of the Memphis Jug Band back in the 1930s.
“I remember the street singers in downtown Memphis,” he recalls. “I would wander around to hear some live blues on the street, guys playing for tips. I was fascinated by the sound. I liked all kinds of music like hillbilly and rockabilly, but blues sounded like how I felt. I really connected with it. And where I grew up people were singing in the fields, and they were singing blues.”
Particularly fascinated by the sound of the harmonica, he would check out junk stores, “looking for old blues 78s. If I had two of the same record I would keep the best one and throw the other away. I probably threw away thousands of dollars of rare 78s. I got to know the old-timers in Memphis, but I didn’t know I was preparing myself for a career.”
Chicago was the next training ground when he moved there in 1962 at the age of 18.
“I just went there because I heard there were good factory jobs,” he says. “I didn’t know there was a blues scene in Chicago.”
In the city’s smoky dens, Musselwhite would hear such famous blues masters as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Otis Spann.
“At first I didn’t tell any of them I played anything,” he continues. “I was just happy hearing all my heroes. They were really tickled that I would go alone to these real rough blues clubs. When they discovered I played, that changed everything.”
Word soon got around about the young white kid who could play a mean harp and the door opened to a full-time music life.
“I started getting offers for gigs,” he says. “The blues just overtook me and said this is what you’re going to do.”
After the release of his first album in 1966, he got a phone call inviting him to play a concert in San Francisco, which would herald an important turning point in his career. Performing at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, he shared the bill with Cream and Paul Butterfield. Since that time, Musselwhite has made Northern California his home.
Consistently releasing solid blues albums over the years, his highlights have included “The Well,” with Mavis Staples singing with Musselwhite on one track; the raw “Delta Hardware”; and the spellbinding “Sanctuary,” with Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama as guests, leading Off Beat Magazine to declare, “Charlie Musselwhite continues to astonish.”
The harmonica virtuoso has a new album out, the live recording “I Ain’t Lyin’,” featuring mostly his original songs, recorded at a festival in Sonoma, Calif.
“The thing about live recordings is that they really capture the spontaneity of the music,” he says. “Something happens live that doesn’t happen in the studio. It’s a great band and we have a lot of fun, and I think that translates to the listener. It’s great to see people moved by the music, smiling and dancing.”
A one-time frequent visitor to Maui, he says he’s been too busy to make it back here until this month.
One wonders if the shark incident dampened his enthusiasm for Maui.
See back in 2000, his wife, Henrietta Musselwhite, went snorkeling off Olowalu just when a tiger shark happened to be hunting. The shark attacked her in 30 feet of clear water about a half-mile offshore and bit her back and thigh. After the incident, she reported she was going to have “shark tattoos put on the scars.”
“We returned the next summer,” says Musselwhite. “Henrietta was right back in the water at the same place. She got a tattoo on her back over the scars. In the paper, they said it was a 12-foot shark, but at the hospital when they were examining the bite, they said it was 18-foot.”
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A Smooth Jazz All-Stars concert Sunday in Castle Theater will feature Grammy Award-winning guitarist Paul Brown, Grammy-winning pianist Gregg Karukas, saxophonist Paul Taylor and Hawaii’s own Michael Paulo.
Known for his sensuous sax playing, Taylor has been a major attraction at smooth jazz festivals since the mid-1990s. He began his career playing with Keiko Matsui’s band for two years, and then he played with the Rippingtons. Taylor has also toured with Groovin’ For Grover, an all-star group with Jeff Lorber, Richard Elliot and Gerald Albright. His solo albums include “On the Horn” and “Tenacity.”
Brown’s talent as producer/engineer has earned him two Grammy Awards. He has worked on projects for such influential artists as George Benson, Aretha Franklin, Al Jarreau and Luther Vandross. Since his recording debut, this contemporary jazz musician has released seven studio albums, including “The Funky Joint” in 2012 and last year’s “Truth B Told.”
Smooth jazz keyboardist Karukas is one of the most sought-after pianists in the genre. An original member of the Rippingtons, he has toured through the years with Boney James, Sergio Mendes, Melissa Manchester and Larry Carlton. He won a Grammy for producing, co-writing and arranging Omar Akram’s “Echoes of Love,” which won Best New Age Album in 2013. His best-known singles, “Girl in the Red Dress” and “Nightshift,” reflect his funky compositional style.
Best known in the islands for playing with Kalapana, Paulo has recorded and toured with such stars as Jarreau, Kenny Loggins, James Ingram and Oleta Adams. His solo albums include “One Passion” and “My Heart & Soul.”
* The Smooth Jazz All-stars concert will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the MACC’s Castle Theater. Tickets are $35, $45 and $65 (plus applicable fees) and are available at the box office, by calling 242-7469 or by visiting www.mauiarts.org.