Albert Cummings, Gloria Deluxe
By Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., February 16, 2001) --Blues guitarist Albert Cummings is on a roll. He recently performed to wild acclaim before a sellout house at Northampton’s Calvin Theatre, where he warmed up the crowd for B.B. King. (The crowd’s affection for the Williamstown native was reportedly not lost on King’s people.) A few weeks earlier Cummings performed at a concert in Troy, N.Y., backed by members of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s acclaimed band, Double Trouble.

That gig went so well that next month Cummings is headed to Austin to record an album with Double Trouble. Seeing Vaughan and his bandmates in a concert in Boston first turned Cummings on to the blues while he was in college, thus bringing full circle a dizzyingly fast and apparently certain ride to the top for Cummings, who still primarily thinks of himself as a builder, husband and father of two children.

Cummings performs with his trio, including Ken Pallman on drums and Don Chilson on bass, tonight at Club Helsinki in Great Barrington. Cummings got a taste of what fame might be like in Northampton, where he received a standing ovation and encore. Plus, when he and a friend went out after the show for a bite to eat, the patrons at a local hangout erupted in a spontaneous round of applause for the singer/guitar-slinger, who has been playing the blues for not much more than a half decade and who says he never even knew who Eric Clapton was until after high school.

Cummings says he can’t pinpoint what it is about the blues that attracts him. “I don’t know where it came from,” he said earlier this week. “I’m really obsessed with it, but I feel like I have a long way to go before I get where I want to be.” He jokes that once people learn that in his daytime job he is a general contractor, then it all makes sense. “You don’t have to be from down south,” he said. “As long as you’re a contractor you can sing the blues.” Tomorrow night, Club Helsinki features soul-jazz organist Ron Levy and his group, Wild Kingdom. For well over a quarter century Levy has been churning out the kind of jazzy, funky, bluesy organ and guitar soul that only recently has become a fad and been given the name “groove.” The Boston-based Levy has worked as a record producer, label executive, songwriter, and arranger, while variously leading his own group, Wild Kingdom, and lending his instrumental skills to a variety of performers, including B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Holmes Brothers, Duke Robillard, Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson, Freddie Hubbard, Karl Denson and Otis Rush.

Gloria Deluxe

Two of the quirkier attractions that have been featured at Mass MoCA will join forces on Sunday at 6 when Cynthia Hopkins, the frontwoman of Gloria Deluxe www.gloriadeluxe.com, last seen warming up the crowd at Mass MoCA for Patti Smith, performs her original composition for Uberorgan, the football-field-sized biomorphic sound machine designed by Tim Hawkinson. Joining Hopkins will be dancer/choreographer Anika Tromholt Kristensen. As Transmission Projects, Hopkins and Kristensen create innovative, experimental dance-theater performances, which expand the boundaries of narrative, theatrical, and musical forms.

After the dance performance, Hopkins will be joined by her Gloria Deluxe bandmates, who together have just released a wonderful new album, “Hooker.” The album is chock full of Hopkins trademark material, featuring her wry and often cynical observations on urban life, romance, family relations and materialism, set to her genre-defying blend of garage-rock, honky-tonk and cabaret-style arrangements.

Songs like “Cheap Two-Faced Star” echo Lou Reed’s street-smart New York rock. But at times “Hooker,” the second album from Gloria Deluxe, finds Hopkins in a more optimistic vein. “A little light is shining on me/A little bit of heaven is just fine with me” she sings on “Little Piece of Grace,” without any apparent irony.

Still, Hopkins doesn’t seem to be softening up to any great extent. “Family Tree” portrays an entirely different set of “family values” than those usually touted by politicians as an ideal to be lived up to; “Such a Long Time” seems as much a love song to the bottle as to a person; “Hospital Waiting Room Blues” is a pitiful slice of life from inside the blur of alcoholism.

In addition to the basic trio of vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Hopkins, guitarist Thomas Hopkins and bassist and drummer Chris Bonner, “Hooker” also includes instrumental contributions from noted downtown musicians Curtis Hasselbring on trombone, violinist Philippa Thompson and trumpeter Cuong Vu. In a recent press release, Mass MoCA described itself as “a testing ground for works that explore new territory, and employ new media, technologies, and materials.” With events like the recent open-rehearsal of Mabou Mines and this weekend’s Uber-event, MoCA is fully living up to its mission as an institution that “shares the behind-the-scenes process of creation with visitors and artists alike, and dims the conventional distinctions between artistic disciplines and between art and technology.”

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Feb. 16, 2001. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2001. All rights reserved.]