Big Sam brings the crowd to its feet at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in April.

“What do you call a trombonist with a pager?

In most burgs on this planet, musicians and music aficionados will circle ’round and sing the answer in unison:

“An optimist!”

But in New Orleans, at least, trombones are no joking matter. They never have been, and certainly weren’t on that Sunday afternoon last April when Big Sam’s Funky Nation wrapped up their set at the N.O. Jazz Heritage Festival’s Gentilly Stage. The 26-year-old Big Sam blew the final blast from his trombone, then thrust it toward the heavens like a conquering Zulu warrior might his bloody spear. BSFN had taken no prisoners on this set, and out front more than 10,000 vanquished fans leapt to their feet and joined Sam in his victory dance.

In a city where trombone stars seem to outnumber guitar slingers, and where they certainly get more hype, press and adulation, Big Sam might just be, as the San Francisco Examiner recently proclaimed, ‘Top man on the slide trombone in the birthplace of jazz these days.’

It’s not just outsiders who dig the big man’s hard-partying groove. Last month at the Big Easy Music Awards, held in a city that seems overrun with world-class funk bands, Big Sam’s Funky Nation was named “Best Funk Group of 2008.”

Big Sam Williams didn’t even get serious about the ‘bone until he was in highschool. Three years later, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band snatched him out of the classroom and took him on a four-year road tour of big stages around the world. For the last few years Sam has also worked with legendary Crescent City producer and songwriter Allen Toussaint, and toured extensively with Toussaint and Elvis Costello promoting their post-Katrina requiem, The River In Reverse.

But since 2001 the big man’s focus has been the ensemble he first put together for late-night sets in clubs across town after the Dirty Dozen shows. Over the past eight years, Big Sam’s Funky Nation has been searing its funky mark onto the New Orleans music scene and beyond, spreading its high-energy musical manifesto from the Big Easy to the Big Apple, San Francisco to Miami, London, Paris, Sao Paulo—and countless points in between. Along the way proving that the trombone is serious business, and its masters true holy men of the groove.

The Waterfront Blues Festival audience got that lesson at last year’s Front Porch Stage “Battle of the ‘bones,” which pitted former James Brown trombonist Fred Wesley against New Orleans’ young wunderkind of brass, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. Shorty, who by 12 was already considered by cognoscenti to be one of the 10 fiercest trombonists on the planet, by his early 20s had become a veritable rock star, touring for two years as featured soloist in Lenny Kravitz’ band, jumping into projects with U-2′ s Bono and Edge, and hauling his young band to major rock, blues and jazz festivals from coast to coast.

Any who missed that lesson get another installment this year, as the Festival reprises the “Battle of the ‘bones II” in a special after-hours Super Jam at the Marriott Hotel Ballroom on July 4^th. Pitted against BSFN will be the Crescent City’s mind-bending Bonerama, whose four–trombone frontline tackles everything from New Orleans street parades to Zepellin and Hendrix classics, and will forever blow anyone’s mind who thinks they know something about brass bands.

Even in a city that doesn’t play by the rules, New Orleans’ Bonerama is something different. They’re not a traditional brass band, but they’ve got brass to spare, even with no trumpets or saxes in sight. They can evoke vintage funk, classic rock and free improvisation in the same set, even the same song. Rolling Stone has hailed them as “the ultimate in brass balls” and praised them for their “…crushing ensemble riffing, human-feedback shrieks and wah-wah growls.” Bonerama carries the brass-band concept to places unknown; what other brass band could snag an honor for “Best Rock Band” (Big Easy Awards 2007)? As cofounder Mark Mullins puts it, “We thought we could expand what a New Orleans brass band could do.”

On a visit to New Orleans during Jazz Fest four years ago, I stumbled on a blog written by Mullins, who’d just been named ‘Trombonist of the Year’ in the Offbeat Music Awards, discussing his hectic schedule during the ten-day stretch of Jazz Fest and its allied after-hours events and club gigs. Including Bonerama’s Jazz Fest set and its late-night gigs at the Maple Leaf, and his guest spots on the Festival’s main stage with legendary New Orleans producer/instrumentalist Dave Barholemew and The Radiators; and in clubs with Galactic drummer Stanton Moore, Meters’ alumni Zigaboo Modeliste and Georege Porter…Mullins in a little over a week played 23 gigs.

What was that joke again about the trombonist with the pager?

• • • • •

Bonerama closes the Miller South stage before the fireworks on July 4th.

Big Sam’s Funky Nation hits the Festival main stage Sunday afternoon July 5^th.

And both show up for Battle of the ‘bones II July 4^th at the Marriott Grand Ballroom, starting right after the fireworks. Admission to the Battle of the Bones is included in the Blues Buddy Pass. Tickets, if they haven’t already been sold out by then, will also be available at the door.

For those who caught Olivia Warfield’s steamy set opening, and all but stealing the show, at last year’s Tribute to Memphis Soul—a night that culminated in headliner Isaac Hayes’ final North American appearance—or remember her belting it out of Waterfront Park a couple of years earlier with the Northwest Tribute to Ray Charles, it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise to find the 29-year-old Portland soulstress on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show last month. For two nights  Liv danced, beamed and did her soulful thing beside that mysterious mega-star formerly, and currently, known as… Prince.

The good news is that Liv, the newest and most prominent in Prince’s trio of backup singers, has landed one of the coolest gigs on the planet.

The bad news is that we won’t see her at this year’s Waterfront Blues Festival, as we’d hoped, to reprise her “Tribute to Sam Cooke,” which all but burned down a sold-out-house last fall at Portland’s Jimmy Mak’s club. We might not see Liv again at the Waterfront, I fear, until she returns as a headliner herself. In the interim, it feels like a big loss to our scene. Liv isn’t just one of the most spectacularly talented young vocalist-songwriters to emerge from Portland of late, she is also among the most genuinely sweet and gracious people I’ve worked with. My former band-mate and buddy, the late Paul deLay, felt the same way. Paul met Liv on the Ray Charles Tribute gigs and recording project, and they performed, as a duet, Ray’s “Hallelujah, I love Her So.” He liked her immensely. Among the many half-finished tunes Paul didn’t get to realize before leukemia interrupted him two years ago, was a duet he hoped to record at some point with Liv.

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Don’t stand too close to Classie Ballou. If lightning strikes again, you might get hit. It struck first in 1952, when Classie and family were summoned to a studio in Lake Charles to back Boozoo Chavis, on what is thought to be the first studio recording session of zydeco music. There was just one problem: according to Chavis, Classie and the band he brought along “had never heard of Zydeco music, let alone played it.”

They let this little recipe for disaster simmer in the studio for about eight hours before giving up.  But somebody must have left the back burner on, because a couple of years later, when Goldband Records finally released a song from that session, it became not only the first classic zydeco hit but also the biggest seller the company had ever had. The track was “Paper in My Shoe” (on Goldband’s Folk Star label). Continue reading…

Like many blues artists, Carolyn Wonderland labored for a long time in obscurity before attracting national attention. For years she and her band played on weekends for next to nothing in Houston’s Last Concert Cafe, a semi-Deadhead scene where she seemed destined to become every aging Texas hippie’s dream girl, if she lived long enough.

By 1994 she had earned enough stature in Houston’s blues community to get the closing slot on a fund-raiser for Johnny “Clyde” Copeland at Rockefeller’s, a performance at which she held her own with everybody who was anyone in East Texas blues, from Lavelle White and Trudy Lynn to Joe “Guitar” Hughes, Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters, and the immortal Eugene Carrier, B.B. King’s longtime organist.

After she relocated to Austin, someone in that scene brought her guitar playing to Bob Dylan’s attention. Dylan was putting together his current road band, and invited her to audition for the slot now occupied by Denny Freeman. Had that gig worked out, she’d be playing in Spain instead of Portland during the week of our festival. Continue reading…

[NOTE: you can catch James Hunter tonight, on the Conan O'Brian show, playing cuts from his new release, The Hard Way].

I first got wind of British soul singer James Hunter a couple of years ago, shortly after the release of his first stateside release, People Gonna Talk. Hunter is a throwback to the Jackie Wilson/Sam Cooke era of sweet soul music. Backed by a case-hardened band, Hunter plays original material that reflects that era of music—melodic but gritty vocals, tight horns and catchy, danceable and absolutely irresistible tunes—but he’s injected the genre with some fresh vitality and his own take on the music.

When I heard he was playing Seattle’s Triple Door two years ago, I made the trek up north. And wasn’t disappointed. He’s a singer of remarkable flexibility and soul, a quirky but effective guitarist, and a truly charismatic bandleader and showman. The emerging artist began to hit the radar of major media, and the album was nominated for a Grammy. Unfortunately, due to tour routing, we weren’t able to sign him for the 2007 festival.

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The world lost another blues legend yesterday, Bo Diddley, to a heart attack at age 79.

Bo never played the Waterfront Blues Festival. I’d tried to get him to headline opening night on a couple of occasions, but the routing hadn’t worked out. I feel wistful about that now, though at the time, I was relieved it hadn’t panned out. Bo was a lone wolf in this busiiness, flying in solo to a gig with only his suit bag and guitar, stepping out on stage in front of whatever backup band the local promoter had pulled together. Particularly in his later years, Bo was known for unpredictable shows and ragged, unrehearsed backup bands—I should know because three years ago I played guitar in one of Bo’s backup bands. Continue reading…

Singer-songwriter Paul Thorn went 14-4 as a professional boxer (including a televised bout with Roberto Duran that the 29^th-ranked world middleweight lost in a seventh-round TKO). And that makes him more than ready to take the music business head on.

Thorn, a rising star if recent appearances on Conan O’Brien’s and Jimmy Kimmel’s show and seven highly acclaimed recordings are any indication, leans toward a deeply rootsy, Americana sound. Think Delbert McClinton, Bruce Springsteen and John Hiatt. The Tupelo, Mississippi-born preacher’s kid is an achingly soulful singer who covers a lot of musical territory.

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A week ago Saturday the rain began early, pouring from the skies in dark sheets ripped by the flash of lightning and the deafening crack of thunder.

“Seems you brought the weather with you,” quipped a local.

“It does not rain like this in Oregon,” I responded. “Ever.”

It was the kind of tropical storm that four years earlier forced the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival to cancel a full day of programming, a move with repercussions still being felt today. It was the fiscal crisis following that decision, many believe, that prompted the festival board to bring in the deep-pocketed, California production company AEG Live to run the event, and nearly sack festival executive director Quint Davis and producer/founder George Wein, who’ve been putting together the continent’s greatest music festival since its beginning 39 years ago. Festivals, even the grandest of them all, are far more fragile entities than most would ever imagine. Continue reading…

On my first of many trips to New Orleans, now nearly ten years ago, I was hurrying through the French Quarter, late for a lunch meeting with my sister-in-law, and initially didn’t notice the kid playing for tips in the hotel doorway. I hustled past, then stopped in my tracks. What stunned me even more than the kid’s virtuosity was the incongruity of his material—a movement from one of Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello, its complex line jumping between registers to imply a contrapuntal duet from a single voice, being sung fluidly, effortlessly on an improbable instrument—a trombone. This small black kid with a horn seemed to be channeling Yo Yo Ma. I joined the group on the sidewalk, listening intently, exploding into applause when he hit the final note. Over the next 15 minutes the kid, who looked all of 10 years old, sliced and jabbed the trombone through an eclectic repertoire of some of the most demanding and unlikely material one might ever hear from that instrument. From Bach he moved to John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” blowing masterfully through what may be the toughest chord changes ever written to solo over. Then “Cissy Strut,” the classic by New Orleans funk pioneers, The Meters; some Gershwin; and then ending with “Saints Go Marching In,” reinvented as a cosmic-comic funk tune. 

The kid played this range of material with such dexterity, with such swinging, funky command of not just the instrument but also very disparate musical genres. I was blown away, yes, but even more, I was baffled. This was a trombone. Most places on

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Where do I begin a blog on the Waterfront Blues Festival? Might as well start at the beginning, the source: New Orleans.

I landed here in the Crescent City yesterday afternoon, between the two ferociously musical weekends known as Jazz Fest. This is the slack time between the bookends of arguably the greatest music festival on the planet, 12 stages of brass bands, blues legends, gospel choirs, Zydeco queens, mega-jam-bands, Cajun fiddlers and rock and R&B stars returning to their roots. The city clears house between shows, sending a couple hundred thousand music fans who ventured down the first weekend back home to make way for a new horde the second. Tuesday and Wednesday fall on the eye of a sonic hurricane walled by two densely packed weekends of round-the-clock musical mayhem.

But even in the eye of the storm, the options on this Wednesday evening are daunting.  Offbeat magazine lists more than three-dozen gigs and concerts at various clubs and concert halls around town that would be worth checking out if I had the time, stamina, and credit limit. But I’m down here, I need to keep reminding myself, not to run amok and run up air-miles on my credit card, but to check out acts for WBF’s future lineups. Among the gigs I’m considering: Continue reading…

Here begins my new blog on the Waterfront Blues Festival, offering you a glimpse into the trials, tribulations, late hour jam sessions, haggling, multi-shot lattés, promo-pack sorting, gig-hopping, and concert binging that goes into putting together the lineup for the West Coast’s largest blues festival. A hundred acts on four stages and five blues cruises, but, more to the point: 200-plus hotel rooms, 80 or more limo runs to and from the airport, bands with bass players flying in from Austin and drummers from New Orleans, rider demands that range from vegan pasta dishes to pork rinds, and demands for odd and obsolete keyboards (anyone know where I can find a Vox Continental?) no one has performed on live in these parts for three decades.

You have a special question about how all this gets put together? Wonder how I find and decide on the acts that make it into the program? Want to know why on earth B.B. King is playing Bend and Jacksonville over the July 4 weekend but not Waterfront Park (I’ll get to that one later)? Want to know how to put your little brother’s bar band from Bakersfield on my radar? Have a suggestion you’re convinced will improve the look, feel or vibe of our event? A favorite act you’d like to see on our stages? Well, I will likely be too harried between now and opening night to respond to any of these, but it’s worth a shot. Send me your questions, suggestions and tirades to the email link below and we’ll see how much of this I can stomach. Starbucks virtual gift cards accepted.

-Peter Dammann, Talent Coordinator

P.S.: If you want to know more about me, and the circuitous path that led me to this strange gig, you can check out Tom D’Antoni’s piece for Artbeat on Oregon Public Broadcasting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN0ePVQbQjU, or Marty Hughley’s profile that ran off the front page of the Oregonian on July 5, 2004…

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