DUKE ROBILLARD KEEPS HIS SOUL ON THE JAZZY SIDE OF BLUES
Guitar veteran back in region with quartet for show at Cafe Lena
Blues icon Duke Robillard is no stranger to the Capital Region, having played in the area many times in his award-winning, fan-pleasing career. He brings his band of jazz-inflected blues, with a strong dose of R&B, to Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs on Saturday.
“I've played in Saratoga at a few different places,” he said from his home in Rhode Island, his native state. “This will be my second time at Caffe Lena. It's a great club because it's a historic place and has a real listening audience. I'm very much looking forward to it.”
Robillard is a musician who gets the joint jumping. This time around, he'll be bringing a quartet with Chris Cote on vocals. Robillard, 73, said he now relinquishes the vocal duties on his tours.
He is twice Grammy nominated, for Best Traditional Blues Album for “Stomp! The Blues Tonight” in 2010 and “Guitar Groove-a-rama” in 2007. He also garnered honors in the Blues Music Awards (formerly W.C. Handy Awards) as Best Blues Guitarist in 2000 through 2004 and was nominated in that category in 2005 through 2008.
More importantly, he took his love of early jazz music and blues, mingled it with funk R&B and developed a well-known style that fans and other musicians admire. He’s worked with great bluesmen like Ronnie Earl and John Hammond, and collaborated with jazzmen like guitarist Herb Ellis and saxophonist Scott Hamilton.
He also founded Roomful of Blues in 1967, with whom he performed for about a dozen years before embarking on a highly successful solo career. For a time, he replaced guitar slinger Jimmie Vaughan in the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
His latest album, released early this year, is “Swingin’again” with Hamilton. But there will be no horns at Caffe Lena, so “we're basically representing music from our early-next-year release, but also stuff that is from my entire career of blues and jazz and roots rock and roll.”
The recording coming out in 2020 will be called "They Called It Rhythm and Blues."“it's primarily an album of blues and early R&B tunes from the '40s and '50s. And there are many special guests like John Hammond Jr., Sue Foley, Michelle Wolf ... It's mostly material from the '40s and '50s R&B with a couple of my original songs,” said Robillard.
He explained that Chuck Berry's “In the Wee, Wee Hours” was the first blues record he heard at about the age of 8. “I didn't know what it was. But it just really overwhelmed me with just the basic vibe of the song. As I went along learning rock and roll guitar as a very young kid, I started discovering blues artists. Sometimes through British bands who played songs by Muddy Waters, artists like Solomon
Burke and Howlin' Wolf and everybody.
“And then I started hearing the blues with horns, like T-bone Walker and B.B. King. And then people like Jimmy Witherspoon, which was as much jazz-based as it was blues. It all started to click to me how they were related.”
He immersed himself in the history of that music. “Then when the swing guys started joining blues singers and R&B came into existence, like Louis Jordan in the 1940s, I followed that whole development of American music up to the beginning of rock and roll . ... It all kind of came full circle, and I still love all of those styles of music, and they're all a big part of my repertoire and my influence,” he said.
It was with Roomful of Blues that he added horns. “I just love that music and I thought it's the perfect combination of horn soloists that are sometimes jazzy and great blues vocalists, and great rhythm dance music. Nobody else was doing at the time. I just wanted to faithfully represent
the sound of that era. So that was my quest for many years.”
His sparkling guitar work is influenced by early jazz players Tiny Grimes and Charlie Christian, and the early electric blues guitarist like Gatemouth Brown, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and Freddy King. “T-bone Walker and all the guys who developed their sound off his style,” was also important he said. “Guitar Slim is another one that was a big influence and still is. You could basically say any pre-1960s blues or jazz guitarist has been an influence on me.”
Robillard said he’s very satisfied with his career. “I still enjoy creating. I love recording. I love playing for live audiences also. If I stopped tomorrow, I'd have to say I've had a very fulfilling life in music.” He never had a blockbuster crossover hit “because my heart is in the older stuff. That's where I live. That's what my love is.”
This will be my second time at Caffe Lena. It's a great club because it's a historic place and has a real listening audience. I'm very much looking forward to it.”
— Duke Robillard