Janiva Magness brings hard-earned blues sound to Anthology

Janiva Magness brings hard-earned blues sound to Anthology
January 25, 2010
Miguel Toombs
SDNN.com

hen Janiva Magness makes the trip to perform Thursday at Anthology, she’ll be in her element.

“I love that venue,” the singer said by phone from her Los Angeles home. “There’s not a bad seat in the house in terms of sound or sight line. And the food is, like, off the hook.

“We often get to play songs we don’t get to play in other types of venues, because it’s such a good listening venue. And that’s going to be my San Diego birthday party. If folks want to come down and wish the old broad happy birthday, that’ll be fine with me.”

This birthday, her 53rd, isn’t the only happy occasion Janiva (pronounced JAN-iv-uh) Magness has to celebrate. She’s the reigning B.B. King Entertainer of the Year (Koko Taylor is the only other female to ever win) and Best Contemporary Blues Female Artist, as determined in last May’s Blues Music Awards. And she’s putting the finishing touches on the follow-up to “What Love Will Do” (Alligator Records). Like the critically acclaimed BMA-nominated album, Magness is co-producing with Dave Darling.

A longtime local favorite who last month headlined a benefit for non-commercial radio station KSDS (“Those guys have played my records pretty much as long as I’ve been making them,” she said), Magness sparkles in her live shows. She matches passionate vocals with a high-heeled strut that recalls another celebrated “old broad,” Tina Turner.

“I love Tina Turner,” Magness said, surprised by the compliment. “Well, Tina is a survivor. And I guess in that regard that puts us in the same category: as Etta James so aptly coined the phrase, ‘rage to survive.’”

While her “rage” has softened over the years, Magness’ survival is the stuff of legend, or at least of an especially memorable blues song.

Musically, she’s overcome being dismissed, almost three decades ago, as being over the hill. An MCA Records vice president told Magness, then 25, “that I was talented but I was too old,” she said. “I tell that story today, and every word of it is true. I tell that on the bandstand because it is so ridiculous.”

Magness, who discovered the blues after she hitchhiked to an Otis Rush concert in Minneapolis at a young age, already had a life story that was ridiculous, although in this case horrifically so. Born in Detroit, she ended up homeless or bouncing from one foster family to another, 12 in two years, after both her parents committed suicide.

Today, she remembers that period by volunteering for the Casey Family Programs.

“I’m really grateful to be able to stand as a spokesperson for National Foster Care Month, which is a cause we celebrate all year long,” Magness said. “I was pretty much dead-heading for a really bad ending. And really, really and truly because a small handful of people within that framework stood up for me, it changed everything.

“I’m interested in testifying to that. I’m interested in encouraging and inspiring other people to step forward for youth at risk in this country. I’m interested in inspiring and encouraging those kids to not give up on themselves, for that textbook predictable thing. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Magness found her experience sadly relevant during a 2008 tour of Iraq, and she’s clearly moved when, whether on stage or in an interview, she discusses her time there.

“It was deeply personal for me,” she said. “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is suffered by kids in the foster system at twice the rate as combat vets. We have it twice as much as they do. That’s really horrifying.

“So, you know how it is when you have a certain thing and you recognize your own kind? It was like that. And I saw it a lot. I had the opportunity to talk to some of them about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Because I’m always going to have that. It’s never going to go away, I’m never going to ‘get over it.’”

“It’s part of my landscape. But I don’t live in that, day after day after day, anymore. They live in it now, day after day after night after day. They live in it.

“I don’t live in that anymore. It’s taken a tremendous amount of very hard work, but most days I’m not in that night. Every once in a while, it crops up. Every once in a while a series of events will happen and I will have an extraordinarily tough time.

“But mostly, I don’t have that issue. What a huge blessing, what a huge healing, to stand there on an airstrip outside of Baghdad and tell a soldier that, smack in the center of that shit, and have him really know what I’m talking about.”