Image via City Winery
Music brings people together, minimizes differences, and unites audience members in common, usually pleasurable experiences. Corky Siegel, a leading blues harmonica player and pianist, is the rare musician who brings together different types of music, celebrates their differences, and provides audiences with truly unique performances.
Siegel calls his music Chamber Blues, and on March 6 he and his band will livestream a concert from Chicago’s City Winey to online audiences everywhere. Country rock singer and Madison native Tracy Nelson will perform vocals with the group, which includes jazz players, a classical string quartet, a poet and an Indian tabla player. Siegel and Nelson were fixtures on the touring circuit of the Upper Midwest in the ‘70s.
“I do what I do and the musicians play behind me,” says Nelson, who now lives in Nashville. “Somehow, it all just works.”
Bringing Cultures Together
Siegel bridles at the term “crossover music,” choosing instead to let his various musical genre players do their own thing, usually all at the same time. “Music is music, and my job is to bring cultures together,” says the Chicago native. “That’s what music does in general and that’s why music is important in the first place.”
When it comes to Chamber Blues, Siegel remembers exactly when and how the whole concept started. Siegel is best known as cofounder with guitarist Jim Schwall of the Siegel-Schwall Band, a first-rate blues quartet who played with blues luminaries like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and others. One night in 1966, Siegel-Schwall was playing at the Chicago club Big John’s when lightening struck.
“Jim and I had just finished a set when this guy came up and said he wanted our band to jam with his band,” Siegel remembers.
The “guy” was Grammy Award-winning classical conductor Seiji Ozawa and his “band” was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Ozawa felt classical music had grown stale and needed rejuvenating. Classical composers like Franz Liszt and Antonín Dvořák often infused their compositions with folk melodies. Ozawa saw the blues as modern-day folk music, Siegel says, and wanted Siegel-Schwall to perform with CSO.
Juxtaposing the Blues
The radical idea took root and the blues band and classical conductor worked with Chicago composer William Russo to create an appropriate work. In 1968, Siegel-Schwall and CSO premiered Russo’s “Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra” at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival. In 1973, Siegel-Schwall and Ozawa, along with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, recorded Russo’s work for Deutsche Grammophon, one of two times the blues band appeared on the prestigious German classical label.
“Seiji told me that I must pursue this juxtaposition of blues and classical as a way to spark the classical form and bring more people together,” Siegel says.
Siegel has since performed with other orchestras, eventually moving to the simpler chamber music format, and started writing classical compositions. The problem was that Siegel couldn’t read music. In fact, he has trouble reading anything at all. “I have a severe learning disability that I think is dyslexia,” he explains. “I never really graduated from high school. I just stopped going.”
One Measure at a Time
The musician’s disability caused him to find his own way to write the music he couldn’t read, which he struggles through usually a measure at a time. He initially turned down an offer to write blues sonatas for the San Francisco Symphony, but eventually wrote three of them.
“Music and my approach to it has become my language,” Siegel says. “My approach is based not on notes, but entirely on expression.”
For Nelson, a two-time Grammy Award nominee who came up through the San Francisco music scene with her band Mother Earth, Chamber Blues is nothing she ever expected to do, but she doesn’t regret a moment of it. “Whenever I find something I like that’s new and different I jump right into it,” Nelson says. “Otherwise, I’d be bored shitless.”
The Corky Siegel Chamber Music Extravaganza livestreams from City Winery on March 6. At 7 p.m. For more information and reservations, visit http://bit.ly/CorkyExtravaganzaCW.
