Duke Robillard's kind of blues
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 10, 1999) -- What strikes a listener upon reviewing several of blues guitarist Duke Robillard's recordings is how little blues guitar music they contain.

Sure, the songs are dotted with Robillard's well-placed licks and solos. But those looking for a lot of hot, flashy picking needn't bother.

So what's the deal? How come the founder of bands like Roomful of Blues and the Legendary Blues Band and the musician whose albums include "Duke's Blues," "Rockin' Blues," and his latest, "New Blues for Modern Man" (Shanachie), isn't another blues-guitar gunslinger? "I love blues guitar - I play it all night - but I try to enhance it or stay away from some of the cliches that have just been done to death," said Robillard in a recent phone interview from Cleveland, where he was to perform along with B.B. King, Ruth Brown, Bo Diddley and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in a ceremony inducting jump-blues legend Louis Jordan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"For me, the whole band is my instrument," said Robillard, who performs in tomorrow night's "Blues Cafe" show, also featuring Guy Davis, at Mass MoCA at 8. "I think there's enough people out there doing the flashy solo thing. I don't want to listen to anything if the band isn't grooving itself."

Robillard has been playing with grooving bands ever since he founded Roomful of Blues back in 1967. In addition to his own groups, he has also performed and recorded with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and as a sideman to such legends as Ruth Brown, Johnny Adams, Kim Wilson, Jay McShann, Pinetop Perkins, John Hammond, Jimmy Witherspoon, Ronnie Earl and Bob Dylan.

While blues is at the base of much of Robillard's music, it's only part of the picture. When it came time for Rounder Records, for whom Robillard recorded for many years, to release a retrospective of his work, the label chose to showcase the guitarist-singer's work on two separate CDs: "Duke Robillard Plays Blues" and "Duke Robillard Plays Jazz."

For Robillard, jazz and blues are inseparable. All the greatest jazz players, people like Louis Armstrong, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Lester Young and Cootie Williams, were great blues players, he says. "That's where I draw my inspiration from, the jazz side of blues playing," said Robillard, who names guitarists including Charlie Christian, Tiny Grimes, Billy Butler, Bill Jennings, Kenny Burrell and Herb Ellis as great jazz guitarists who were also very bluesy.

Later this month, Robillard will release an album of guitar duets recorded with Herb Ellis, featuring old swing tunes and jazz that will show "the natural side" of Robillard's playing, he said.
The sound on Robillard's last album, "New Blues for Modern Man," is, like many of his recordings, drenched in R&B-style saxophones. "That's a sound I developed early on with Roomful of Blues," he said. "It goes back to the sound of swing bands. Basically swing and Kansas City jazz are at the base of a lot of my music, and certainly are what I'm most comfortable with. "It's all based on riff-based jazz. Like horns in unison or harmony riffs. It's a natural part of my sound, and it's easy for me to work with that."

Robillard said that while he has heard about the neo-swing revival currently under way, he hasn't seen any first-hand evidence of it other than a swing dance his band played with Jay McShann at Lincoln Center in New York last year. "I've read about it but I haven't seen for myself what this revival is," he said. "Swing has always been part of what I do. It's always been in my show. I just don't confine myself to one exact style because the makeup of my musical heritage is really kind of almost everything American, except for country music: blues, R&B, roots-rock, jazz, swing, are all part of the makeup of who I am."

Robillard said that while he has pretty much always listened to pop and rock music, he caught the blues bug at an early age. "I just heard that music and it just sounded like the truth," he said. "When I was fifteen years old I listened to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and I just related to it."

In recent years Robillard has taken up photography as a serious hobby, an avocation in which he finds correspondence with music. "I look at photography like recording, because it is recording," he said. "You're capturing a moment and encapsulizing it. It will never change. It's there for the world to see the way that second was, just like that three minutes of a song you recorded."

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[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Oct. 15, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]