Dia G 29.3.09 (1) - Keith B. Brown - Delta Soul (2005 US)

By Carlos "Dr.16"
El equipo galletero te da la bienvenida

Reseña recogida de : www.javierortiz.net

Dicen de él que es uno de los mejores intérpretes actuales de country blues. Su familia proviene
de la cuna del blues rural -el Delta del Missisippi-. Allí llegaron
sus ancestros africanos como esclavos para trabajar en los campos de
algodón. Posteriores generaciones fueron aparceros y más tarde se
trasladaron de Mississippi a Tennessee donde nació Keith B.Brown en Memphis.

Conociendo su historia se podría discutir si estaba predestinado para tocar blues del Delta, pero también desde un punto de vista más pragmático podría decirse que su subida a la cima como quizá el intérprete más grande y más puro de blues del Delta de su generación, sea simplemente la evolución o la trayectoria de un hombre con un gran talento musical. Seguramente un poco de ambas cosas debe haber, pero de lo que no hay duda es que este joven blues man, está bien enraizado en sus orígenes e interpreta el blues tradicional con una fuerza y una sensibilidad con las que no cualquiera está dotado.

Sus primeros pasos en la música no empezaron con el blues. Con dieciocho años escuchaba y tocaba folk, country, rock y diferentes estilos musicales, hasta que un día escuchó a Muddy Waters cantando un espiritual y se lanzó a conocer más sobre esa música que tanto le había emocionado.

De Muddy Waters saltó hacia los primeros grandes blues men del Delta: Son House y Robert Johnson, después vendrían Skip James, Bukka White, Fury Lewis o Fred Mac Dowell. Pero Keith B. Brown reconoce la especial influencia que sobre él ha ejercido Son House (para él: The Father) y admite que fue la llave que le abrió la puerta para descubrir no sólo su inclinación musical sino también para comprender mejor la historia de sus antepasados, su propia historia.

Aquí os dejo, un video de uno de sus conciertos en Mataró.

Delta Soul has interesting notes, in terms of both music and liner commentary. Like the various much older, now gone bluesmen he emulates, Keith B. Brown took up guitar on the side, though the side of a college education, majoring in history. Like old bluesmen he played what was around to be heard, but like the people responsible for the blues revival which began forty years back, he realised there was a lot more to a few things which normal channels let him hear only a little of. So he took that seriously.

Blues, as the late English critic Eddie Lambert observed, isn't pre-jazz, pre-rock, or pre-anything. It's blues. Forty years of "the future of the blues" has been a succession of modish dilutions into pap pop. This isn't what Brown wants, but in the (verbal) notes he expresses his wish that blues included more variety... well, a little more history would have told him bluesmen seldom stuck exclusively to blues. Hack work apart, some played marginal stuff of independent interest which didn't muddle their specialised blues techniques. Some played hack work on all fours with local make-do musicians, but played blues brilliantly when persuaded that was what was wanted.

Brown crosses the margin with three (all self-penned) guitar-accompanied songs and one unaccompanied song, "Niggers and Rednecks," musically on the gospel side, like "All I Need," which has some nice guitar sliding—though the words concern more a young lady than Brown's heavenly home. "Who's to Blame" is 1960s folk revival, the poorest performance; "Didn't Come Today" is standard gentle singer-songwriter fare, which does raise an issue regarding Brown's "Illinois Blues" and "Me and the Devil," intelligently reconceived from the original vocal and guitar masterpieces by Skip James (depicted by Brown as an actor in the Scorsese/Wenders film The Soul Of A Man) and Robert Johnson (Brown had the role of another master represented here, Son House, in the Johnson biopic) respectively.

As a guitarist in his young prime, Skip James swung! At slow tempos where it's nearly impossible, dammit, he swung! He was a fabulous player, and Brown does well with his music (much transcribed long ago by Stefan Grossman) and even James's vocal idiom (local to Bentonia, Mississippi, recorded also by Jack Owens). But a legitimate, maybe necessary criticism of "Illinois Blues" and "Devil" is that the guitar parts somewhat lack a rhythmic profile. Brown has worked out the music better than fine, but his playing lapses into slack folkiness at times. Not dreadfully, and not so you'd notice in a context only of his immediate contemporaries. But he should listen to early Big Joe Williams—and Louis Armstrong!

Brown's other House and James numbers are pretty good, but Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Easy Rider" is a masterpiece, the musical identity of Jefferson's composition all there, but in a Mississippi idiom up with the best old guys. On House's "Shetland Pony" the guitar part is like a more rollicking Fred McDowell, on whose own "Callin' Me" Brown's personal combination on guitar of McDowell, House, James, and others is moving and powerful very differently from McDowell himself.

It was high time fate allowed some young member of the Mississippian diaspora to play—generally very well and sometimes brilliantly—songs his grandmother (see the liner notes) knew, connecting family memory and experience into very superior music.

CD en mp3 (320 Kbps) y FLAC

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