Saturday 17 July 2010

Little Axe: from blues to hip-hop and back

Little Axe
 
New blues ... Little Axe. Photograph: York Tillyer
Skip McDonald was playing a gig in Portugal, billed as just him and guitar. A fair portion of the audience had seen the billing and decided an evening of traditional blues was just what they wanted. They might have wanted traditional blues, but they didn't get it. On entering the venue, they came across a stage upon which stood not a stool, a microphone and a guitar, but a selection of samplers and computers, as well as the setup for a full rock band."The purists were outraged," says McDonald. "About 20 of them started walking out. The rest of them stayed and we got on fine. It was a particularly good gig."
He can laugh about it now, because 17 years after starting his Little Axe project, in which the old Delta blues is reinterpreted with the aid of technology, what was a revolutionary approach to an old music has become the norm. Beck and Moby took McDonald's ideas and placed them in the mainstream. McDonald, who's flattered by his imitators, would be happy with their kind of sales, but more important to him is his mission to redefine what constitutes the blues.
"I don't like the way music is put in little boxes with a label on it," McDonald says. "I hear the blues in a lot of different types of music that no one would ever call the blues. And I don't think the blues has to be about pain. You might have a lyric about going across town where there's a woman who's nice to you. The blues can be joyous. There are two types of music: deep and shallow. For me, the blues is anything that starts with an emotion."
McDonald was born Bernard Alexander in Dayton, Ohio in September 1949. He was taught to play blues guitar when he was eight by his father, a steel worker who played at weekends. McDonald's father drilled home the importance of having a steady job, but the son wanted to chance his arm making it in music. He left home at 17, playing jazz, funk and disco up and down the east coast before he met bassist Doug Wimbish and then, in 1979, drummer Keith LeBlanc. As the house band of Sugarhill records, the trio played on some of the early hits of hip-hop – The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five; White Lines by Grandmaster Melle Mel. Rap's modern take on the blues hit him "like a left hook from nowhere. Those early gigs in Harlem were just completely crazy."
McDonald went from Sugarhill to recording with Afrikaa Bambaataa and James Brown ("a serious man. I learned to call him Mr Brown"), with Sinéad O'Connor and – in another association with a label – the On-U Sound imprint of the English producer Adrian Sherwood, where the McDonald-Wimbish-LeBlanc trio formed the core of Tackhead, the avant-garde funk band that often served as On-U Sound's house band in the 80s.
McDonald first recorded as Little Axe in 1994, and his latest album, Bought for a Dollar, Sold For a Dime, takes McDonald full circle by reuniting the Sugarhill trio for the first time in 17 years. "To be true to yourself sometimes you have to go back to the beginning," he says, echoing the album's lyric about how a man must return to the crossroads to find himself. "I have a chemistry – a telepathy – with those people." But Little Axe remain a broader church. At one gig, the band were joined on stage by superfan Robert Plant.
"He's known for heavy metal, but I hear a blues singer," McDonald says. "I get into trouble for saying this but when I hear Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones they're immersed in blues. It's an endless journey for us all. I feel like I'm just getting started."
Dave Simpson @'The Guardian'
(Thanx Owen!)

No comments:

Post a Comment