Janiva Magness Broadens the Blues - Contemporary Blues ...

Janiva Magness Broadens the Blues

Janiva Magness Broadens the Blues
July 28, 2010
by JOSEF WOODARD
Santa Barbara Independent


GRIT AND WISDOM: In the classic and sometimes over-mythologized definition of the blues, the music is more than just a three-chord-based howl of joy and pain. It’s an expressive vehicle for transcendence over worlds of hurt, personal, racial, and otherwise. By that measure, the powerfully fine singer Janiva Magness could be considered a blues poster woman. She endured a rough childhood in Detroit, with parents succumbing to suicide; a series of foster homes; and giving up her own child to adoption at age 17. From adolescence on, the blues was her obsession and ticket to surviving and thriving, as she worked her way slowly into a life as a singer of uncommon grit and wisdom.

Courtesy Photo
Janiva Magness
Fast forward to 2010, and Magness is riding rightfully high, having recently released her ninth and possibly greatest album, The Devil Is an Angel Too (Alligator). Although a longtime Los Angeleno, Magness makes her long-awaited official Santa Barbara debut Friday, July 30, at Warren Hall, hosted by the almighty Santa Barbara Blues Society. Her arrival in this hallowed venue, a reliable pressure cooker of blues worth hearing, comes at a ripe, triumphal moment in her life and career. Now 53, Magness has found herself in a later-blooming high style, toasted around the world, lavished with Blues Foundation awards, and appearing on NPR. She is reaching a growing audience both in the blues scene, proper, and wherever fans of good, important music live. In some way, her recent rise can be compared to the recent renascence of the stirring veteran soul singer Bettye LaVette—also hailing from Detroit.

Janiva Magness
Where: Warren Hall, Earl Warren Showgrounds, 3400 Calle Real, Santa Barbara
Cost: $15 - $30
Age limit: 21+
Full event details

In fact, the style meter on Magness’s new album moves to various sides of the true blues genre, into swampy and country blues areas, as well as toward the vintage soul pulse. Listen, for instance, to her fresh and retro-slinky take on Jeff Barry’s great song “Walkin’ in the Sun” or the gospel-influenced album-capper, “Turn Your Heart in My Direction.” But throughout, we sense an underlying foundation of blues authenticity. Through her uncanny mixture of precision, tonal purity, scratchy-toned abandon, and inspired emotion-channeling, Magness’s music feels steeped in cathartic conquest over life’s woes, plus gratitude for the stuff of life.

Apart from musical passions, Magness is an avowed advocate for foster care issues (check her site, janivamagness.com), as a way of giving back for her troubled early years. Musically, too, though, we can subtly sense the long arc of the fully formed woman using her art to rise above the turbulence of her past. For this and other reasons (including a hot live show reputation and a reportedly solid band), Magness’s Warren Hall show ranks highly on the not-to-miss index.