Lurrie Bell lives, plays the blues - Contemporary Blues Men

Lurrie Bell lives, plays the blues
January 7, 2011
By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS
Traverse City Record-Eagle

TRAVERSE CITY â€” Lurrie Bell is as iconic to the Chicago blues as the blues are to the Windy City.

So when it was time for Dennos Museum Center Director Gene Jenneman to book the blues acts for this year's Dennos concert series, he took the recommendation of blues DJs at WNMC Radio and lured Lurrie north.

"We've been talking to Gene about him for years," said Leroy Alvarez, WNMC blues music director and host of the Saturday morning program "Good Moanin' Blues." "You go to anyone in Chicago and talk about him and everybody knows who he is."

Bell will kick off the Dennos concert season with his Chicago Blues Band on Saturday, Jan. 8. The band â€” Bell on electric guitar and vocals, Willie Hayes on drums, Melvin Smith on bass, and Omar Coleman on harmonica â€” will perform traditional 12-bar modern Chicago blues, an intense, visceral kind of blues.

Bell started playing guitar at 6 and was a prodigy of his father, blues harmonica master Carey Bell. By the time he was 17 he had made his stage debut, formed his first band, appeared in the recording studio with his father, and performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival with fellow "Sons of the Blues" Freddie Dixon (son of Willie) and Billy Branch (son of Ben).

He was also playing behind some of the legends of the Chicago blues scene including Eddy Clearwater, Big Walter Horton and Eddie Taylor.

At 20, he joined Chicago's "Queen of the Blues," Koko Taylor and her Blues Machine, and the only way for him seemed up.

But personal problems including drugs and depression had Bell living the blues as well as playing them through the '80s and early '90s. At one point he was even homeless.

Just when it seemed he'd gotten his life and career back on track, tragedy struck again in 2007 when Bell lost both his father and his life partner. But instead of sending him into another tailspin, the deaths caused him to buckle down harder. He formed his own label, named after daughter Aria, now 5, and recorded his latest and most heartfelt album, "Let's Talk About Love."

"When you go through changes like that it teaches you something about yourself," said Bell, while on vacation recently in California. "You realize how important it is to be playing and performing music, that this is what you're supposed to do. You take music serious."

Now, at 52, Bell is coming on stronger than ever. Besides receiving a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for Best Traditional Blues recording, he was voted Most Outstanding Guitar Player in the 2007 Living Blues magazine critic's poll, and was nominated for a 2007 Blues Music Award for Best Guitarist by the Blues Foundation.

Currently he's working on a project of acoustic blues and gospel of the kind he often played with his dad and at church in Mississippi and Alabama where he lived with his grandparents for a time. He also tours outside of Chicago and in Europe two or three times a year and contributes to recordings, which already total more than 50.

But it's his regular Chicago gigs at places like Blues on Halsted, Buddy Guy's Legends, Rosa's Blues Lounge and House of Blues that attract true blues connoisseurs like Alvaraz.

"People like to hear authentic Chicago blues as opposed to watered-down rock blues. People come from all over the world to Chicago to experience that," Alvaraz said.

In a sign of how far he's come, Bell hasn't bowed under the pressure of industry accolades calling him maybe "the greatest blues guitar player that ever lived" and "a blues master at a needed time when there are very few blues masters left."

Instead, "it makes me realize that my music is very, very important, how so many of the bluesmen are gone and passed away," he said. "I'm carrying on a tradition that all these people that were living laid down all those years ago. It's like a compliment. It makes me play harder and longer. It encourages me."

And there's hope on the horizon for another generation of Bells to carry on the blues tradition if Aria lives up to her potential.

"She listens very well so maybe she can become a musician," Bell said. "It would make me proud to know that she wanted to play."

Tickets for Saturday's 8 p.m. concert in Milliken Auditorium are $25 in advance at 995-1553 or www.dennosmuseum.org and $28 at the door. They include admission to the galleries before the performance and a reception with the band after.