A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, February 16, 2019
Otis Rush (1934-2018) : Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
Breaking into the R&B Top Ten his very first
time out in 1956 with the startlingly intense slow blues "I Can't Quit
You Baby," southpaw guitarist Otis Rush subsequently established himself as one of the premier bluesmen on the Chicago circuit. Rush was often credited with being one of the architects of the West Side guitar style, along with Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. It was a nebulous honor, since Rush
played clubs on Chicago's South Side just as frequently during the
sound's late-'50s incubation period. Nevertheless, his esteemed status
as a prime Chicago innovator was eternally assured by the ringing,
vibrato-enhanced guitar work that remained his stock in trade and a
tortured, super-intense vocal delivery that could force the hairs on the
back of your neck upwards in silent salute. If talent alone were the
formula for widespread success, Rush
would certainly have been Chicago's leading blues artist. But fate,
luck, and the guitarist's own idiosyncrasies conspired to hold him back
on several occasions when opportunity was virtually begging to be
accepted.
Rush came to Chicago in 1948, met Muddy Waters, and knew instantly what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. The omnipresent Willie Dixon caught Rush's act and signed him to Eli Toscano's
Cobra Records in 1956. The frighteningly intense "I Can't Quit You
Baby" was the maiden effort for both artist and label, streaking to
number six on Billboard's R&B chart. His 1956-1958 Cobra legacy is a
magnificent one, distinguished by the Dixon-produced
minor-key masterpieces "Double Trouble" and "My Love Will Never Die,"
the tough-as-nails "Three Times a Fool" and "Keep on Loving Me Baby,"
and the rhumba-rocking classic "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)." Rush
apparently dashed off the latter tune in the car en route to Cobra's
West Roosevelt Road studios, where he would cut it with the nucleus of Ike Turner's combo.
After Cobra closed up shop, Rush's recording fortunes mostly floundered. He followed Dixon
over to Chess in 1960, cutting another classic (the stunning "So Many
Roads, So Many Trains") before moving on to Duke (one solitary single,
1962's "Homework"), Vanguard, and Cotillion (there he cut the underrated
Mike Bloomfield-Nick Gravenites-produced 1969 album Mourning in the Morning, with yeoman help from the house rhythm section in Muscle Shoals). Typical of Rush's horrendous luck was the unnerving saga of his Right Place, Wrong Time
album. Laid down in 1971 for Capitol Records, the giant label
inexplicably took a pass on the project despite its obvious excellence.
It took another five years for the set to emerge on the tiny Bullfrog
label, blunting Rush's momentum once again (the album was later made available by HighTone). An uneven but worthwhile 1975 set for Delmark, Cold Day in Hell, and a host of solid live albums that mostly sound very similar kept Rush's
gilt-edged name in the marketplace to some extent during the '70s and
'80s, a troubling period for the legendary southpaw.
In 1986, he walked out on an expensive session for Rooster Blues (Louis Myers, Lucky Peterson, and Casey Jones
were among the assembled sidemen), complaining that his amplifier
didn't sound right and thereby scuttling the entire project. Alligator
picked up the rights to an album he had done overseas for Sonet
originally called Troubles, Troubles. It turned out to be a prophetic title: much to Rush's chagrin, the firm overdubbed keyboardist Lucky Peterson and chopped out some masterful guitar work when it reissued the set as Lost in the Blues in 1991.
Finally, in 1994, the career of this Chicago blues legend began traveling in the right direction. Ain't Enough Comin' In,
his first studio album in 16 years, was released on Mercury and ended
up topping many blues critics' year-end lists. Produced spotlessly by John Porter with a skin-tight band, Rush roared a set of nothing but covers, but did them all his way, his blistering guitar consistently to the fore.
Once again, a series of personal problems threatened to end Rush's
long-overdue return to national prominence before it got off the
ground. But he remained in top-notch form, fronting a tight band that
was entirely sympathetic to the guitarist's sizzling approach. Rush
signed with the House of Blues' fledgling record label, instantly
granting that company a large dose of credibility and setting himself up
for another career push. However, his touring and recording were
brought to a halt following a debilitating stroke in 2003. His album Live... and in Concert from San Francisco was released by the Blues Express label in 2006, having been recorded in 1999. On September 29, 2018, Otis Rush died from complications arising from the stroke; he was 83 years old.
Otis Rush, Influential Blues Singer and Guitarist, Is Dead at 83
Otis Rush and his band performed at Pepper’s Lounge in Chicago in December 1963. Credit: Ray Flerlage/Cache Agency
by Bill Friskics-Warren
Otis
Rush, a powerful blues singer and innovative guitarist who had a
profound influence not just on his fellow bluesmen but also on rock
guitarists like Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, died on
Saturday. He was 83.
His wife, Masaki Rush, announced the death on Mr. Rush’s website, saying that the cause was complications of a stroke he had in 2003. She did not say where he died.
A
richly emotive singer and a guitarist of great skill and imagination,
Mr. Rush was in the vanguard of a small circle of late-1950s innovators,
including Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, whose music, steeped in R&B,
heralded a new era for Chicago blues.
While
Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, his predecessors from the city’s South
Side, popularized an amplified update of the bare-bones sound of the
Mississippi Delta, Mr. Rush’s modernized variant — which came to be
called the West Side sound because of its prevalence in nightclubs in
that part of town — was at once more lyrical and more rhythmically
complex.
“The sound was a
radical departure from the down-home records that dominated the market
at the time,” the producer Neil Slaven, contrasting Chicago’s West Side
sound with its South Side counterpart, observed in the notes to a
compilation of Mr. Rush’s 1950s recordings for the independent Cobra
label.
Mr. Rush’s output for Cobra
showcased his lacerating, vibrato-laden electric guitar lines and his
gritty, gospel-inspired vocals — throaty mid-register groaning,
thrilling leaps of falsetto. Holding sway beyond Chicago, his adopted
hometown, this early body of work served as a rich repository of
material for the blues-rock bands of the 1960s.
The
British group John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, which featured Mr.
Clapton on lead guitar, included a version of Mr. Rush’s slow-burning
1958 shuffle, “All Your Love (I Miss Loving),” on its 1966 album, “Blues
Breakers.” Led Zeppelin reimagined Mr. Rush’s grinding 1956 hit, “I
Can’t Quit You, Baby,” on its debut album, “Led Zeppelin”; the Rolling
Stones updated the same song in 2016 on their album “Blue and Lonesome.”
The
Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan named his band after Mr. Rush’s
minor-key tour de force “Double Trouble.” Virtuoso rock guitarists
including Johnny Winter and Duane Allman have also cited Mr. Rush as an
influence.
Mr. Rush’s guitar
technique owed a debt to the discursive single-string voicings of jazz
players like Kenny Burrell and jazz-inspired bluesmen like T-Bone Walker
and B. B. King. But it was also attributable to the fact that Mr. Rush
played his instrument left-handed and upside down. Curling the little
finger of his pick hand around the bottom E string of his guitar enabled
him to bend and extend notes, to dazzling emotional effect.
“When
you play lefty, you’re pulling that vibrato down to the floor,” Mr.
Rush told Vintage Guitar magazine in 1998. “That makes things a lot
easier in terms of pressure and control.
“Pulling down makes more sense, to me anyway,” he added, “and I can work it stronger and get it to sustain better."
Mr. Rush after receiving a Grammy Award in Los Angeles in 1999 for best traditional blues album, for “Any Place I’m Going.”CreditSam Mircovich/Reuters
The
critic Robert Palmer, in his book “Deep Blues” (1981), wrote
rapturously of Mr. Rush’s musicianship. “His guitar playing hit heights I
didn’t think any musician was capable of: notes bent and twisted so
delicately and immaculately,” he wrote, “they seemed to form actual
words, phrases that cascaded up the neck, hung suspended over the rhythm
and fell suddenly, bunching at the bottom in anguished paroxysms.”
In
an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1968, the guitarist Michael
Bloomfield said that white blues bands hoping to prove themselves in
the 1960s “had to be as good as Otis Rush.”
In 2015 Rolling Stone ranked Mr. Rush 53rd on its list of “100 Greatest Guitarists.”
He
was born on April 29, 1935, in Philadelphia, Miss., one of seven
children of O. C. and Julia (Boyd) Rush. Reared by his sharecropping
mother, Otis and his brothers and sisters were often kept out of school
to work in the fields to make ends meet. Otis dabbled on the harmonica
before he began teaching himself the rudiments of the guitar at age 8.
He moved to Chicago in 1949 after visiting one of his sisters there and
seeing the likes of Muddy Waters and Little Walter perform in the city’s
South Side clubs. He found work in the local steel mills and stockyards
and as a truck driver, and began taking guitar lessons from a local
musician, Reggie Boyd.
Mr.
Rush first appeared in public in 1953, performing unaccompanied and
billed as Little Otis. Three years later he was leading a trio at
Chicago’s celebrated 708 Club, where he impressed the bluesman Willie
Dixon, then working as a talent scout for the West Side businessman Eli
Toscano. Mr. Toscano signed Mr. Rush to his newly founded Cobra label in
1956.
A series of commercial and
financial setbacks followed. Several record deals unraveled, including
the one with Cobra, which went bankrupt in the late 1950s, a casualty of
Mr. Toscano’s mounting gambling debts.
In
what would prove to be a streak of unusually bad luck, Mr. Rush’s
subsequent recordings, for respected blues labels like Chess and
Delmark, were often unreleased or delayed. Most notable was “Right
Place, Wrong Time,” an album postponed five years before its release in
1976 on the tiny Bullfrog label.
Ultimately
acknowledged by fans and critics as a classic, the album might have
brought Mr. Rush greater acclaim had it enjoyed the promotional backing
of its original, more powerful label, Capitol Records.
Exacerbating
misfortunes like this was Mr. Rush’s reputation as a moody and erratic
live performer who could enthrall audiences one night but seem
lackluster and aloof the next. Some of his recordings were uneven as
well, marred by lesser material and slapdash production — a far cry from
his peak work for Cobra and Chess.
Weary
and disillusioned, Mr. Rush retired from performing in the late 1970s.
He staged a comeback in the ’80s and, though he recorded only
sporadically after that, he did win a Grammy Award, for best traditional
blues album, for “Any Place I’m Going” in 1999. That same year he was
inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. He did not make another studio
album but continued to tour until he had a debilitating stroke in 2003.
Mr.
Rush and Masaki Rush had two daughters, Lena and Sophia, as well as
several grandchildren. He also had two sons and two daughters from an
earlier marriage. Complete information on survivors was not immediately
available.
Though unquestionably a
progenitor of an important strain of Chicago blues, Mr. Rush, in an
online interview, denied having had any part in coining the term “West
Side sound” to describe his music.
“The
public came up with this, not me,” he said. “You know, they had the
West Side, South Side and North Side. They started naming it Chicago
blues. I don’t know: Chicago blues, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New
York. Who cares? It’s blues, you know?”
Correction:
An
earlier version of this obituary incorrectly explained a quotation from
Mr. Rush that began, “When you play lefty, you’re pulling that vibrato
down to the floor.” He was referring to a manual technique executed
without the use of an external mechanical device, not to the tremolo bar
of an electric guitar.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Otis Rush, Blues Musician Who Influenced Rock Guitarists, Dies at 83. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
Otis Rush, Seminal Chicago Blues Guitarist, Dead at 84
Key architect of ‘West Side Sound’ died from complications related to a stroke
by
Jon Blis
Rolling Stone
Otis Rush, one of the pioneering guitarists of the Chicago blues scene, died Saturday from complications from a stroke he suffered in 2003. He was 84.
Rush’s wife, Masaki Rush, confirmed her husband’s death on his website.
A note read, “Known as a key architect of the Chicago ‘West Side Sound’
Rush exemplified the modernized minor key urban blues style with his
slashing, amplified jazz-influenced guitar playing, high-strained
passionate vocals and backing by a full horn section. Rush’s first
recording in 1956 on Cobra Records ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ reached
Number on the Billboard R&B Charts and catapulted him to
international acclaim. He went on to record a catalog of music that
contains many songs that are now considered blues classics.”
Rush
became a staple of the Chicago scene in the late Fifties and early
Sixties, partnering first with Cobra Records, which was also home to
artists like Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. Their take on the blues would
prove to be a revelation for a generation of artists to follow, while
Rush would become a totem for countless rock guitarists (he was placed
at Number 53 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists).
Notably, Rush’s signature style – long, dramatically bent notes – was
in part a product of his unique playing approach: A left-handed
guitarist who played his guitar upside-down, placing the low E string at
the bottom and the high E string on top.
In 1968, Mike Bloomfield summed up Rush’s influence, tellingRolling Stone that in Chicago, “the rules had been laid down” for young, white blues bands: “You had to be as good as Otis Rush.”
Rush was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1935 and
began teaching himself the guitar at age eight. He moved to Chicago in
1949 and was inspired to pursue music full time after seeing Muddy
Waters live. In 1956, Rush released his first, and most successful
single on Cobra, “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” Along with its chart success,
Led Zeppelin famously covered the cut on their 1969 debut.
During his Cobra years, Rush recorded with a revolving
cast of musicians that included Ike Turner, Big Walter Horton, Little
Walter and Little Brother Montgomery. His output also featured classic
cuts such as “My Love Will Never Die,”“All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” (later covered by John Mayall) and “Double Trouble” (Stevie Ray Vaughn later named his band after that track).
After Cobra went bankrupt, Rush released a pair of singles
on Chess before moving to Duke Records in the early-Sixties. But it
wasn’t until 1969 that Rush released what was essentially his first
album, Mourning In the Morning, which he recorded at the legendary FAME Studios with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
Rush continued to tour and record during the Sixties and
Seventies, though seemed perpetually dogged by label issues. For
instance, Capitol Records refused to release his acclaimed LP Right Place, Wrong Time, and it wasn’t until 1976 – five years after it was recorded – that Bullfrog Records finally put it out.
In 1994, Rush released Ain’t Enough Comin’ In, which at the time marked his first record in 16 years. Two years later, his album, Any Place I’m Goin’
won him the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. Though that LP
would be his last full-length studio effort, Rush contributed to various
tribute albums and remained a regular live performer until health
issues forced him off the road.
As a child Otis Rush, a left hander, turned over his brother’s guitar so
the bass strings were at the bottom and afterwards always played that
way.
Photograph: STR/EPA
Talent unrewarded, hopes frustrated – familiar tropes of the blues
life, but few musicians struggled against them as long as the singer and
guitarist Otis Rush, who has died aged 84. Though early recordings such
as All Your Love (I Miss Loving) and I Can’t Quit You Baby impressed Eric Clapton, John Mayall and Jimmy Page
and in the 1990s journalists were calling Rush “the greatest living
bluesman”, in the interim his progress was repeatedly logjammed by
unsupportive record deals. In the late 50s and early 60s he was one of Chicago’s brightest rising stars, tagged with Magic Sam and Buddy Guy
as a creator of the spiky new West Side sound, but after his first
record label, Cobra, went out of business he was signed by Chess, which
did little for him, and Duke, which did less. “I started lagging with
recordings,” he said later, “and it seemed like all I was meeting up
with was crooks.” Yet in the opinion of his friend and regular rhythm guitarist Mighty Joe Young, “Otis was the hottest thing in Chicago then. With the right company, he could have been a real big artist.” He was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where his mother, Julia,
raised seven children with little help from their fathers. One of his
brothers had a guitar and the left-handed Otis simply turned it over so
that the bass strings were at the bottom of the fretboard, learned to
play that way and never changed. Around 1948-49 he moved to Chicago, from where one of his sisters had
been writing home about the blues scene. He worked on his
guitar-playing, performed in clubs and by the mid-50s had enough of a
reputation for Willie Dixon, Chicago’s leading A&R man, to sign him
to a label he was helping to launch. I Can’t Quit You Baby, his 1956
debut for Cobra, was astonishing, full of suspense and passionately
sung, with a brief but petrifying guitar solo.
Over the next two years he followed it with tracks such as My Love Will Never Die, Groaning the Blues and Double Trouble,
a broadside of social dissatisfaction: “Some of this generation is
millionaires, but I ain’t got decent clothes to wear.” (Stevie Ray
Vaughan would borrow the title for his band.) These early sides – for
which he said he was never paid – possessed a screaming modern intensity
that sharply distinguished him from older bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
In 1965, evading his Duke contract, he recorded for Sam Charters’
project Chicago/The Blues/ Today!, which presented him to the new white
audience for blues. He won a place on the 1966 American Folk Blues
festival, touring Europe, and several years of bookings at the Ann Arbor
Blues festival in Michigan. An album for Atlantic, Mourning in the Morning, was judged
disappointing, but in 1971 a major label, Capitol, finally noticed him.
The resulting LP was excellent but its title, Right Place, Wrong Time,
was all too accurate, and it remained unreleased until a small label
acquired it in 1976. Around that time Rush accrued two Downbeat awards
as an artist “deserving wider recognition”. Some irony there, since at
that point he had been making music for two decades. “What do you do in your spare time?” asked Living Blues magazine at the close of a long interview in 1976. “Worry about my damn hard times and bills.” As well he might. Club work in Chicago was disappearing for everyone.
Rush toured Europe several times, and became popular in Japan, but his
performances were sometimes uneasy. His disenchantment with the record
business increased after an album made in Sweden in the 70s was picked
up by Alligator in 1991 and radically remixed without his participation
or, he claimed, approval. He was at last drawn back into the studio in 1994 to make Ain’t Enough Comin’ In,
produced by John Porter and intelligently conceived to introduce him to
a new generation of fans. Promotional touring brought him back to the
UK for the first time in years.
In 1998, in another long Living Blues interview with Jas Obrecht, he
sounded more at ease, confident of his status and proud of his latest
album, Any Place I’m Going (1998), which continued his rehabilitation
and won him a Grammy. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in
1984. “Been some powerful stuff happened to me,” he had commented to
Obrecht. There was more to come. In 2003, a stroke robbed him of his
wonderfully flexible voice and guitar-playing and he became a wheelchair
user. For his admirers, the rest was silence.
He is survived by his wife, Masaki, and their daughters, Lena and
Sophie, and by two sons and two daughters from a previous marriage.
• Otis Rush, blues musician, born 29 April 1934; died 29 September 2018
The blues form reached both artistic and emotional peaks in the works
of Otis Rush,
who was born south of Philadelphia in Neshoba County in 1935. His music,
shaped by the hardships and troubles of his early life in Mississippi,
came to fruition in Chicago in the 1950s. As a singer, guitarist,
bandleader, and songwriter, Rush set new standards in Chicago blues and
influenced countless blues and rock musicians, including Eric Clapton
and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Otis Rush rose from the poverty of a Mississippi sharecropper’s life
to international fame as one of the most passionate singers and
brilliant guitarists in the blues world. Rush, the sixth of seven
children, was born in 1935, according to family sources, although
biographies often give his birth date as 1934. His mother, Julia
Campbell Boyd, ended up raising her family alone on farms in Neshoba and
Kemper counties. During the throes of the Great Depression in a
segregated society, although times were hard, with the children often
missing school to work in the cotton fields, Julia Boyd did own a
wind-up Victrola record player. Rush heard blues records at home and on
jukeboxes in Philadelphia when his mother would bring him to town. He
began playing harmonica, and also sang in a church choir.
When his oldest brother, Leroy Boyd, was away from home, Otis started
secretly playing Leroy’s guitar. With no musical training, he devised
his own unorthodox method, playing left-handed
with the guitar upside down. Rush’s distinctive style was rooted in his
self-taught technique and his ability to transform sounds he heard into
notes on his guitar. One sound he recalled from his childhood was
Leroy's whistling.
As a young teen, Rush was already married, sharecropping cotton and corn
on a five-acre plot. On Otis Lewis’s farm, Rush heard guitarist Vaughan
Adams, a friend of his mother's, but there were few other blues
musicians around Philadelphia. Rush only became inspired to be a
professional musician after visiting his sister in Chicago. She took him
to a Muddy Waters performance, and, as Rush recalled, “I flipped out,
man. I said, ‘Damn. This is for me.’”
Rush moved to Chicago and learned Waters’s music, but soon developed a
more modern, original approach that made him one of the most exciting
young talents in the blues world. In 1956, his first record, “I Can’t
Quit You Baby,” produced by Willie Dixon on the Cobra label, was a
national rhythm & blues hit, later covered by Led Zeppelin and
Little Milton Campbell. Its depth and intensity set the tone for the
music Rush trademarked–heartrending blues that sometimes brought
audiences to tears. Rush continued to perform in Chicago and around the
world, developing devoted followings in Europe and Japan. Heralded as a
“guitar hero,” he shared stages with Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Buddy
Guy, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame
in 1984, and won a GRAMMY® award in 1998 for his CD Any Place I’m Going.
It’s hard to argue with Otis Rush when he says he’s fortunate. He was
born to a poor single mother, in a poor county, in a poor state. He
spent most of his childhood working in and around the fields of
Philadelphia, Mississippi, often being pulled from his grammar-school
classes by local white men who suddenly found themselves in need of a
farmhand. So the idea of becoming one of his generation’s most important and
influential blues guitarists – a key progenitor of the fiery and soulful
Chicago West Side sound that emerged in the mid-1950s – must have
seemed about as possible as a Delta summer without humidity. That’s probably why Rush could never picture himself as a recording
artist. In the rural South of the 1930s and ’40s, where sharecropping,
lynchings and Jim Crow were the rules and not the exceptions, it was
hard to be a dreamer. “I mostly just picked up the guitar for myself,”
the 66-year-old Rush says from his sweet Chicago home. “Around
Mississippi, ain’t nothin’ but trees and a few peoples there. It’s
lonely. So I’d just pick up the guitar for myself.” Like so many other African-Americans of his generation, Rush felt a
better life beckoning. And after visiting his sister in Chicago (“in
about 1949 or 1950,” he recalls), he decided to stay a while. His
decision, no doubt, was influenced by the blues legends his sister took
him to see: Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Jimmie Rodgers, to name a
few. Before age 20, Rush was playing his own local gigs, and by the
mid-1950s was a regular at the 708 Club. There he met noted songwriter
Willie Dixon, who introduced him to Eli Toscano of Cobra Records. Rush
soon joined the budding label and thereafter assembled a stunning
catalog of evocative blues, including a reworked version of Dixon’s “I
Can’t Quit You, Baby” along with originals like “All Your Love (I Miss
Loving)” and “Double Trouble.” With an aggressive, attacking playing
style highlighted by piercing, stinging runs of single notes, Rush was
not only defining his own sound, but that of an entire generation as
well. Talents like Magic Sam, Buddy Guy and Freddie King soon followed,
and all came from a similar mold.
Rush would later record for Chess Records and more than a half-dozen
other labels during a career that’s notable not just for its originality
and influence (read: Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor and Stevie Ray Vaughan),
but also its trials and tribulations: Rush has struggled to peacefully
co-exist with the business aspects of the music industry, at one point
going more than 15 years between studio albums. And by his own
admission, he spent many a day battling the bottle. But his name and
reputation remain intact, and his 1998 effort for House of Blues,
Anyplace I’m Going, is regarded as one of his best-and it even earned a
Grammy. “I thank God,” Rush says softly. “I drop my head, my hands over my
eyes It’s a blessing. I look back at my mother. She raised seven
children. She scrubbed them floors on her knees tryin’ to get a little
money here and there, and that tore me up. So I’m blessed, I’m grateful,
and I’m gonna keep on tryin.'” Guitar.com: What do you remember most about growing up in Mississippi? Otis Rush: It was tough, man. It was a struggle to
go to school, even no longer than I went. To eat, to live was hard. We
were sharecroppers. That’s when you don’t own your own place but you
want to make some kind of living, you know, so you had to go to the
white man’s place and sharecrop with him and work his land. He’d furnish
your tools or whatever you need, and at the end of the year, out of the
crop, he’d get half of it. And all of the costs and the wear and tear, I
gotta pay that outta my half. I just get what’s left. You’d have very
little left, sometimes not enough Guitar.com: You first learned to play on your brother’s acoustic. Did he teach you anything? Rush: I learned to play by myself. Nobody helped me.
Nobody teached me. That’s why I play left-handed. If somebody would
have been there to teach me how to play the right way, I would have had
my strings strung up the right way. But nobody was there, so I learned a
note here and a note there, and here I am, still trying to learn. Guitar.com: You must have found religion when you arrived in Chicago and started seeing people like Muddy Waters in person. Rush: Each time I went, I could hear ’em from
outside before I walked in the club. And I was always like, ‘That’s a
record playin’!’ But I’d walk in and see ’em playin’ on stage, and man, I
just froze right there. Guitar.com: Although you’d learned about the guitar in Mississippi, did these club shows provide more inspiration? Rush: Man, after one of those first shows, I went
home a bought me a little, cheap guitar called a Kay. That amplifier was
so light, you’d play a note and it would almost jump off the floor and
dance. I’d start practicing, and I just went from there. I started
tryin’ to make those sounds that they was makin’. I was up on the third
floor [of his sister’s apartment] of 3101 Wentworth in Chicago, South
Side. The neighbors wanted to call the police on me, mad at me for
making that noise. I was like, ‘Man, I’m tryin’ to learn how to play
this guitar like Muddy Waters!’ Guitar.com: You’ve crossed paths with so many guitar legends. How did they affect your playing abilities? Rush: You learn from listening to any guitar player.
If you’re interested in learning about music, you just pick up things
from each one. And from that, you put it into your style. But you don’t
forget those particular notes, so you make up your own song. We all play
like each other in a sense. If we all had to play our own music, there
wouldn’t be too many musicians. [laughs] Guitar.com: After a lifetime of this, what comes next? Rush: I’m gonna keep recording and gigging, and keep
tryin’ to learn how to play my guitar and sing. You never learn it all.
There’s always something to learn. I don’t care if you’re the greatest,
there’s always something to learn on that instrument. You know what I
mean?
Chicago abounds with treasures we often
take for granted. For the scenic view it`s hard to beat Lake Shore
Drive; for culture there`s the Art Institute; for world-renowned
architecture you need only take a good look at the city`s skyline. And for world-class blues guitar, there`s Otis Rush, who can be found working the North Side blues clubs just about any weekend. Along with Buddy Guy,
Rush remains one of the most influential blues guitarists to emerge
from the fertile Chicago blues scene of the late `50s. Eric Clapton has
long acknowledged Rush as a key influence on his style and has recorded
numerous songs over the years associated with Rush. The late Stevie Ray
Vaughan was another Rush acolyte, and he named his group, Double
Trouble, after a Rush song.
But
unlike Guy, who has been getting reams of national press of late and
has a current album on the charts, Rush is largely unknown except to
blues aficionados.
A
longtime Chicago blues scene observer once commented, ''On a good night
Otis Rush makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.'' Saturday
night at B.L.U.E.S. Etcetera was such a night. Backed by his
well-rehearsed quartet the 57-year-old Rush and his red Gibson guitar
held a packed house spellbound and had the club`s front windows steamed
up by the third tune.A very unconventional guitarist, the
left-hander plays an upside-down right-handed guitar. But unlike most
southpaw guitarists, he doesn`t restring the guitar, meaning that his
fingerings are completely different than 99 percent of the guitar
playing world. It`s as if a pianist played an instrument where the black
and white keys were reversed.
Due in part to his unusual
approach, Rush has a sound that is distinctive from the very first note.
Hearing his trademark intense finger vibrato and microtonal string
bending-playing the notes between the notes-is also a reminder of his
influence on more celebrated players. If you`ve heard Jimi Hendrix`s
''Red House,'' you`ve heard an almost pure homage to Otis Rush.
Rush has a reputation as a somewhat mercurial
character, but he was all smiles on the bandstand Saturday in his cowboy
hat, stylish gray suit and Western boots, mixing blues standards with
some of his classic tunes. ''Gambler`s Blues'' was a simmering
slow blues that featured one of Rush`s most impassioned vocals, while a
jump blues instrumental spotlighted ace keyboardist David Friebolin,
whose jazzy Hammond organ-like sound perfectly offset Rush`s jazz-tinged
chording. On ''Right Place, Wrong Time'' Rush got more emotion
out of a single trilled note than most guitarists pack into an entire
solo. Less celebrated than his playing is his singing, but Rush`s vocal
call and response with his guitar on ''Let`s Have a Natural Ball''
showcased his plaintive style. Perhaps the night`s finest
moment was during one of Rush`s best-known tunes, ''All Your Love.'' A
minor-key blues-Rush`s specialty-he imbued it with his most
heart-wrenching playing of the night, as the rhythm section of second
guitarist James Wheeler, bassist Fred Burns and drummer Sam Burton
deftly navigated the song`s rhythmic twists and turns.
A true Chicago treasure, Otis Rush deserves a spot on your ''to discover'' list.
Legendary Chicago blues vocalist and guitarist Otis Rush died at
the age of 84 on Saturday due to complications from a stroke in 2003.
He scored his first chart-topping hit in the ’50s with the
single, “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and he’s influenced everyone from Eric
Clapton and Led Zeppelin to Santana and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Rush, along with other blues musicians like Buddy Guy and Magic Sam,
helped define Chicago’s West Side electric blues sound that would become
so influential. Though Rush wasn’t as well known as B.B. King, Buddy
Guy or Albert King, he influenced countless musicians, and he’s a
quintessential member of the American blues canon.
Rush’s gospel tenor voice along with his sui generis guitar
playing style (he was left-handed and his guitar was strung upside-down
and backwards) that resulted in heavily bent notes made him truly one of
a kind. Born in Philadelphia, Miss., the self-taught musician cut his
teeth in the Chicago blues scene; he was initially inspired by seeing
the legendary Muddy Waters perform.
Rush’s refined take on urban blues eventually earned the admiration of
many musicians past and present including Waters.
Recording for labels like Cobra, Duke and Chess Records, Rush
became known for singles like “Double Trouble,” “My Love Will Never Die”
and “Keep Loving Me Baby.” Through the years, Otis recorded with
musicians like Little Walter, Big Walter Horton and the Muscle Shoals rhythm
section. He performed live with musicians like Eric Clapton and Luther
Allison and he later appeared on albums by Peter Green and John Mayall.
Rush was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1984 and this year,
after a six decade-long career, he was honored by the Jazz Foundation
of America with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2016, Chicago Mayor
Rahm Emmanuel honored Rush by declaring June 12, “Otis Rush Day” in
Chicago.
Gregg Parker, founder of the Chicago Blues Museum, said of Rush, “He was one of the last great blues guitar heroes. He was an electric god.”
The year was 1956, the label was Cobra, and all of Chicago was
rocking to the deft little tune, along with blues hipsters all over the
country. This came smokin’ in right on the heels of other smashes like
“I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “My Love Will Never Die,” and “Groaning The
Blues,” all of which were chartbusters for Mr. Otis Rush, the man many
guitarists acknowledge as the father and progenitor of the tough,
snarly, minor-keyed blues that hint at the darkness and celebration of
the human condition.
To this day, Rush remains that rare artist – the true-to-his-soul and
unsparingly emotional individual who can pour out every iota on stage
while remaining a very private individual off stage. This ability to
voice feeling, love, pain, and despair, all within the confines of a
measured 12-bar blues has led some of the record-buying public and even a
few reporters into thinking Rush must be even more expansive and
opinionated when not in the spotlight. But again, he is a true believer
in the ability of getting out angst through the purity of song.
“Yes, that’s right,” Rush says. “Sometimes I feel the happiest – or I
should say the most content – when I’m sitting around in my empty house
playing the blues on my guitar. Don’t matter plugged in or not, I like
it both ways, so sometimes I’ll be quite loud and others, why, you can
hardly hear me. But for me, anyway, that’s when I play and sing my very
best.
“See, I moved up from Philadelphia, Mississippi (to Chicago), in like
1949 or ’50. I had a fairly big family, too – four brothers and two
sisters. And you could say I was trying to find me, you know, find that
part of yourself that ain’t nobody else has, that little something
special that makes a person who they are.
“Well, we was livin’ in Chicago around 31st and Wentworth in an
apartment, and I bought myself my first guitar, a cheap little Sears
thing, I think, and someone took me down to hear a band play at a club.
This is something very hard to understand these days, so explain this
to your readers; I mean the first group I ever heard in my life was
Muddy Waters, with Jimmy Rogers on guitar and Junior Wells on harp!
Now, how are you supposed to beat that?”
Rush can talk at length about the revelatory experience of hearing
the first phase of the original Chicago blues as it was being
formulated. Rush was born in 1934, so he was 16 years old at the time.
And it wasn’t just him.
“No, that’s right. Take a look at Eric Clapton and Keith Richards
and all those English cats,” he says. “They were just babies when this
was going down, and it hit them hard, too. You could say that music
changed all of their lives, also. But I was there, man. I saw it and
felt it and set out to capture that ability to transform your life
through song.”
His patented vibrato technique – that slow, sultry sweep that quavers
and pulsates with just the right shake, can fool a listener at first.
One might think they’re hearing amp vibrato or tremolo, but watching
Rush up close, you see it’s all right there, in his hands.
If, like most current blues fans, you missed Rush’s big string of
Cobra hits in the late ’50s and ’60s, don’t worry – there’s still time!
Rush is one artist who is at the peak of his game right now. It’s
still all there, along with the wisdom and maturity of age that graces
his performances with all of the fire and dynamics of his best singles
laid out side-by-side with some newly-penned tunes and enough breathing
space to give you an occasional break.
All too often, familiar performers tour with sort of a reconstituted
greatest hits package; a little window dressing, but not much going on
in terms of audience connection and emotion. But this man works out
like he’s trying to come to terms with something, and when he’s really
on, there is no stopping him.
“Well, that really is true,” Rush confides. “I try to talk through
the method of a song and I’m also still looking for something. I don’t
know…a feeling, I guess. See, when I started out, I loved Earl Hooker
(John Lee’s cousin), he was my man and he played slide. I wasn’t
comfortable with that bit of pipe on my finger and I also really liked
B.B. King, you know? His sound was, still is, so articulate and
defined. So, really, I tried to combine that slidin’ sound, which is
harsh and heavy, with B.B.’s style of vibrato. And I came up with me!”
Sitting next to Rush as he fingers chords and goes to town on his
lead work is a good lesson in sparseness and controlled fervor. He can
grab the neck and shake it firmly, yet he retains a gentleness and
sensitivity that gives his vibrato clarity and control. In terms of
gear, Rush says, “Well, there’s two guitars I really like – my Gibson
semi-hollows and Fender Strats. I can go with the Gibson 345 or 355,
but any of the semi-hollows do it for me. Actually, with either heavy
strings or sometimes lighter ones like a 10-46 set. But, like with
anything, there’s always something else out there. And for me, well,
the Strats just can do some things and feel a bit differently than the
Gibson, and sometimes I’ll trade-off.
“For amps, I can’t deny I really liked those old 4 X 10 Bassmans.
That was all I ever needed. These days, sometimes I run through a Mesa
Boogie for that extra oomph, and sometimes I use a Victoria, which
sounds to my ears pretty much like the old Bassman I used to have.
“But we were also trying to find something out there on the stage.
See, a lot of times I feel I play a tune too long. Now I know it’s
standard to extend a piece in concert, as opposed to how it is on the
record, but that’s not how it is with me. At home, when it’s just me
and my guitar, I swear at times it’s perfect. The notes come out just
right, my singing feels good, and I’m content. But get me under those
lights and people are screamin’ and the band’s all jumpin’ around and
sometimes, to me, I just don’t get the tone and the feelin’ the way I
want; the way I can feel it wants to come through.
“You know, I’ll blow through a solo, 12 bars or whatever, and I’ll be
thinkin’ ‘I know this come out better at home last night.’ So I’ll
bide my time, take another pass at it, and try to do it better. It goes
both ways. I play reactionary, so I move with the crowd. But that can
be distractin’, too.”
Rush also feels being left-handed is a definite advantage for his
chosen instrument, and points to guys like Albert King and Jimi Hendrix,
who also developed signature sounds.
“See, when you play lefty, (upside down right-handed guitars), you’re
pulling that vibrato down to the floor. That makes things a lot easier
in terms of pressure and control. It only makes sense,” he said.
“It’s a lot less stress to tear a house down than to build it up, right?
Pulling down makes more sense, to me anyway, and I can work it
stronger and get it to sustain better. ‘Course, besides all that, I
kinda like doing things backwards, anyway.”
Rush is also a typical example of the consummate artist who is all
about his music, and not involved in the cooperate aspects of marketing
“soul.” He had a great jump start at Cobra, under the tutelage of Eli
Toscano, who was murdered during Rush’s major hit streak with the label.
“Yeah, he was a sweet man who hung too much with gamblers like Shakey
Jake and all them. And he ended up in real serious trouble.”
Though he received a Grammy for his recording “Right Place, Wrong
Time,” it took six or seven years for it to be released on Hightone.
“It’s just a thing with me,” he said. “I do what I do as best as I
can, but I don’t stump around arguing with label owners. If they don’t
like what I put out, I guess I just sit back and wait to see what
happens.”
Apparently an awful lot of people like what Rush does best, and
besides players like Clapton and Richards, Duane Allman and Mick Taylor
list him as a mentor. If you want a fine sampling of Rush holding court
in front of a captivated audience, get Otis Rush Tops, a
recording on the Blind Pig label that features live versions of songs
like “Right Place, Wrong Time,” “Crosscut Saw,” and “Keep On Lovin’ Me
Baby.”
If you’re hungry to hear how the man works when he has the studio to himself, pick up Lost In The Blues,
on the Alligator label, and listen to the special spin he puts on
standards like “Little Red Rooster” and “You Don’t Have To Go.”
Onstage, Rush provides a full, lusty sound, augmented by a lot of people, including Bobby Neely on sax.
“Yeah, I always liked a horn brace, you know? It gives you something else to bounce off of, and it really rounds the sound.”
Alan Lomax, author of The Land Where The Blues Began,
maintains that the subtleties of true blues music are as varied and
precise as the most finely-honed and carefully crafted opera. The book,
a carefully researched documentary, was inspired by years spent combing
the Mississippi Delta in the days of segregation, trying desperately to
unravel the mysteries and driving forces behind the American music we
have come to know as “the blues.”
Without getting into the oft-quoted argument about how “you can’t
play the blues if you never had ’em,” the simple fact is certain music
rings true. Perhaps Joe Moss, a Chicago-area blues guitarist, said it
best when he recently opened for Rush at Buddy Guy’s Legends.
“I’d like to thank Buddy Guy for having us here,” he said. “It’s
great to be playing. But, actually, the biggest thrill is taking the
stage before Mr. Otis Rush, because he is really the *#@!!”
Buddy’s smile, from the back of the room, was easily visible onstage.
And everyone in the room shook their heads in agreement. ‘Cause there
are speed-freak polynote players all over town, but when Rush starts
squeezing that neck, nobody can touch him!
Otis Rush photo by Frank Falduto.
This article originally appeared in VG‘s July ’98 issue.
Otis Rush is maybe the greatest guitar king ever to make Chicago
blues. Rush is also known as “Little Otis” to all the big time blues
stars in Chicago. Otis Rush is well known for his electrifying voice and
for being one of the first baritones to reach popularity in the blues
industry. Rush uses his great voice to deliver his songs with plenty of
experience and pure emotion. Otis Rush was born one of seven children in Philadelphia, Mississippi,
on April 29, 1934. As a child, he wanted a lot of attention from his
mother when he was younger. Rush worked in the fields to help his mother
in his younger days. Otis, along with his other brothers and sisters.
had to support each other without the help from a father figure. (Living Blues 96) Rush moved to Chicago in 1948, but he had learned to play the guitar,
which he played upside down and left-handed. and harmonica as a child
in Mississippi. That’s when he found out that he could play, create,
and write songs for himself. By 1954 he had begun to play the guitar in
earnest, inspired first by the rugged Delta blues of Muddy Waters and
Howlin’ Wolf and then by the recordings of B.B and Albert King. Rush
gained enough respect in Chicago blues circles for the composer and
bass player Willie Dixon to help him secure a recording contract with
Cobra Records in 1956. (www.Blueflamecafe.com) Rush signed with Cobra Recordings. He released his first single Can’t Quit You Baby
and became number nine on the top- ten list. (www.Blueflamecafe.com)
Cobra Recording collapsed so Rush had to go elsewhere. For a time he
recorded with Chess Records, Duke Records, Atlantic Records, Capitol
Records, and Quicksilver Recording Company. Although Otis Rush has gone through hard times and situations in his
lifetime, he still remains one of the greatest blues artists in the
United States. He still performs although for a time he had gone into
retirement. Otis Rush has to be one of Mississippi’s most talented
artists.
Timeline
1934 Otis Rush born in Philadelphia, Mississippi
1948 Otis Rush moved to Chicago.
1954 Rush began playing the guitar.
1956 Otis Rush signed a contract with Cobra Records.
1960 Rush signed with Chess Records.
1961 Rush switched to Duke Recording Label.
1969 Rush received a contract with Cotillion Records.
He set the standard for the slow blues —in his minor-key life as well as his music.
Born: 1935 Died: 2018
by CARLO ROTELLA
December 27, 2018
New York Times
The song begins with a great
resonating shout of joy and pain that resolves into the word “Well,”
swooping down from a soaring A flat to E flat. “I can’t quit you, baby,”
the singer continues, the band entering with a crashing seventh chord,
“but I got to put you down for a while.”
It’s one of the most potent blues voices of all
time, holding and bending notes with equal parts barroom ardor and
churchy conviction. You can hear Mississippi and Chicago in that voice,
elegance and passion, a uniquely intense staging of the essential blues
drama of tension and release.
The guitar responds with a six-note phrase,
played twice. An ideal match for the voice, the guitar’s sound is
stingingly incisive, rich with vibrato and its own exhilarating bends
and sustains, at once lush and restrained.
The singer and guitar player is Otis Rush — in
1965, at the height of his musical powers. The song, “I Can’t Quit You
Baby,” is part of a body of recorded work that includes a dozen or so
slow-blues performances that set the standard for the form. Nobody
climbed deeper into a slow blues, especially a brooding slow blues in a
minor key, than Otis Rush at his best.
He was not always at his best. He was a
feelingful man, and things got to him; he had off nights. Money
problems, the stress of touring and recording, a career that didn’t
produce success commensurate with his ability, the prospect of a big
break that might compensate for all the near misses and setbacks — any
of it could send him into a depressive funk or an agitated state. He
loved exploring the inner depths of a song, but showbiz oppressed him.
He
came to Chicago from Philadelphia, Miss., in 1949, and in the 1950s he
recorded an epochal series of singles for Cobra, a local label. His
peerlessly expressive voice and jazzy, sophisticated guitar caught the
ear of the blues world and of rising rock stars who would imitate him
and pay him homage for decades to come.
But Cobra paid erratically at best, and his
subsequent brushes with major-label stardom didn’t pan out. He didn’t
sound entirely comfortable on a rock- and soul-inflected album he
recorded for Cotillion in 1968, and when he did deliver his best in the
studio, in 1971, Capitol refused to release the album. (It finally came
out on a tiny label in 1976.) Being on the road unnerved him, and though
he felt more at home in familiar neighborhood joints in Chicago, the
late hours and low pay wore on him. Acutely sensitive to conflict, he
shied from the violence that could flare up in those places. He was
haunted by an incident he witnessed from the stage of the Alex Club in
which the club’s owner was killed when he tried to break up a fight on
the dance floor between two nurses from a nearby hospital who were armed
with surgical blades. Rush’s minor-key sense of foreboding deepened
further when his ex-wife’s son was shot to death in 1974.
Serially let down and denied his due, Rush also
let opportunities go by untaken. He canceled important tours, and
during gigs he would lapse into rambling confessionals or sleepwalk
through endless guitar solos. He declined an invitation from the Rolling
Stones to record and tour with them, and he backed out when Johnny
Winter tried to give Rush’s career the same kind of boost he had given
to Muddy Waters by producing a record for him. When Winter, sitting in
Rush’s car with him, pressed for an explanation, Rush just said, “All I
can do is get angry.” He was a gentle soul, but he had been disappointed
by the music industry more times than he could count.
Rush
had a cold during the recording session for Vanguard in 1965 that
produced the finest version of “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” He kept his
singing to a minimum, but he did go all out on “I Can’t Quit You Baby”
and another slow blues, “It’s My Own Fault.” That makes the session a
landmark in American music, capturing him in the gap between his initial
success in Chicago and the period to come when major labels never quite
figured out what to do with him. He was still playing at the Castle
Rock, Curley’s Twist City and other West Side clubs, but his aversion to
touring was already powerful enough to limit his career. By the 1980s,
he was hardly performing at all, but then came a welcome late burst of
recording and recognition in the 1990s before a stroke ended his
performing career in 2003.
Up and down, good times and bad, flashes of
greatness and long stretches of scuffling, a whole lot of tension and a
measure of glorious release: a blues life in a minor key.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Carlo Rotella is the director of
American studies at Boston College. His next book, “The World Is Always
Coming to an End,” will be published in April.
Guitarist and vocalist Otis Rush, long revered as a pioneer of Chicago’s blues scene, died on Sept. 29 at age 83.
Rush had not been an active performer in recent years, following a stroke he suffered in 2003.
His discography includes the album Any Place I’m Going
(1998), which won a Grammy in the category Best Traditional Blues Album.
The album featured a few of Rush’s original compositions, including
“Keep On Loving Me Baby” and “Looking Back.”
His other Grammy-nominated albums are Ain’t Enough Comin’ In (released in 1994), So Many Roads (recorded live in Tokyo in 1975) and Right Place, Wrong Time (recorded in a San Francisco studio in 1971).
Rush was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi. As a teen in 1949, he
moved to Chicago, where, over the course of his career, he would perform
at venues on city’s West Side, South Side and North Side. Rush appealed
to a diverse fan base drawn to his fiery guitar work and passionate
vocals.
His early work on the Cobra label contains songs that became blues
classics, including his debut single from 1956, a rendition of the
Willie Dixon composition “I Can’t Quit You Baby.”
In Charles Carman’s article “The Worrisome Woes of a Workingman,”
published in the April 7, 1977, issue of DownBeat, Rush said, “If you
got a band and the band is playing well, and everybody acts like they’re
ready to play, then it’s a nice feeling to be onstage. You get a good
feeling playing the blues sometimes. You can let it out that way, but it
doesn’t cure anything.”
In addition to influencing generations of blues artists, Rush also
was admired by rock stars. He performed with Eric Clapton at the 1986
Montreux Jazz Festival, and he opened for Pearl Jam at Chicago’s Soldier
Field in 1995.
Among the artists who have recorded “I Can’t Quit You Baby” are Led Zeppelin, John Mayall, Gary Moore and the Rolling Stones.
Rush was the subject of a tribute at the 2016 Chicago Blues Festival, which he attended. Among Rush’s accolades is his induction into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame (1984).
A statement on Rush’s website indicated that the funeral service would be private and that a public celebration of his work was in development. DB
Otis Rush released some of the most harrowing, emotionally intense blues
ever recorded during his late-50s tenure at Chicago's Cobra label.
Though he continued to perform and record, sometimes brilliantly, until
his 2004 stroke, those early sides remain the cornerstone of his legacy.
Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1934, Rush moved to Chicago in
1948. At first, he considered himself primarily a harmonica player, but
he honed his guitar chops, incorporating progressive, jazz-influenced
ideas he absorbed from the recordings of T-Bone Walker. By the mid-50s,
he was leading his own band (as "Little Otis"), and in 1956, Willie
Dixon brought him to the west-side recording studio owned by Cobra
proprietor Eli Toscano. There, along with fellow young lions Buddy Guy
and Magic Sam, Rush helped develop a high-energy sound that emphasized
guitar dexterity and emotional fervor, soon to be known as the "west
side" style of Chicago blues—something of a misnomer, since the artists
themselves performed all over town, and they didn't live just on the
west side.
"I Can't Quit You Baby," Rush's first recording and Cobra's debut, made
it to number six on the R&B charts in 1956. Rush never charted
again, but he'd continue to build on the approach he used for that song:
he delivered Willie Dixon's lyrics in a tremulous wail pitched
somewhere between anguish and terror, and his guitar work (though
somewhat muted by the production) achieved a similar intensity.
Subsequent outings, especially minor-key masterpieces such as "Double
Trouble" and "My Love Will Never Die," delved into realms of emotional
devastation that few blues artists before or since have dared explore.
After Cobra folded in 1959, Rush soldiered on (the 1960 Chess single "So
Many Roads, So Many Trains" is a highlight), but it wasn't till the
mid-60s that he was "rediscovered" and canonized by a new generation of
fans. His output over the next several decades was uneven, but at his
best (1976's Right Place, Wrong Time, 1994's Ain't Enough Comin' In) he summoned enough of his genius to further his reputation, even among newcomers unfamiliar with his early work.
This tribute to Rush features more than 25 musicians and singers, among
them several of his Cobra-era contemporaries and younger players who
carry a torch for his style. Keeping such a massive revue on track will
require such logistical finesse that the show seems likely to maintain a
perilous balance between inspiration and catastrophe—but in a way,
that's appropriate. Rush's music is a front-line dispatch from psychic
battlefields where inspiration and catastrophe feel simultaneously
imminent. It's unclear whether the man himself will be able to attend,
but friends and admirers are hoping for the best—after a life too often
rocked by "double trouble," he deserves to bask in the love and
recognition of as many admirers as Grant Park can hold.
The Blues Festival's Otis Rush Tribute takes place Sunday, June 12,
at 8 PM at the Petrillo Music Shell. Participants include Jimmy Johnson,
Abb Locke, Brian Jones, Carl Weathersby, Bob Stroger, Sumito Ariyoshi,
Big Ray, Eddy Clearwater, John Kattke, Mike Welch, Rawl Hardman, Harlan
Terson, Bob Levis, Billy Flynn, Mike Wheeler, Lurrie Bell, Shun Kikuta,
Mike Ledbetter, Eddie Shaw, Sam Burton, Willie Henderson, Diane Blue,
Ronnie Earl, Anthony Palmer, Kenny Anderson, Leon Allen, Henri "Hank"
Ford, and Willie Wood.
American Blues musician Otis Rush poses for a portrait at his house in Chicago on July 25, 1993
Legendary Chicago blues guitarist Otis Rush,
whose passionate, jazz-tinged music influenced artists from Carlos
Santana and Eric Clapton to the rock band Led Zeppelin, died Saturday
(Sept. 29) at the age of 84, his longtime manager said. Rush succumbed to complications from a stroke he suffered in 2003, manager Rick Bates said. Born
in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Rush settled in Chicago as an adult and
began playing the local clubs, wearing a cowboy hat and sometimes
strumming his guitar upside down for effect. He catapulted to
international fame in 1956 with his first recording on Cobra Records of
“I Can’t Quit You Baby,” which reached No. 6 on the Billboard R&B
charts. He was a key architect of the Chicago “West Side Sound”
in the 1950s and 1960s, which modernized traditional blues to introduce
more of a jazzy, amplified sound. “He was one of the last
great blues guitar heroes. He was an electric God,” said Gregg Parker,
CEO and a founder of the Chicago Blues Museum. Rush loved to play to live audiences, from small clubs on the West Side of Chicago to sold out venues in Europe and Japan. “He was king of the hill in Chicago from the late 1950s into the 1970s and even the 80s as a live artist,” said Bates. But he got less national and international attention than some other blues musicians because he wasn’t a big promoter. “He preferred to go out and play and go back and sleep in his own bed,” said Bates. “He was not a show business guy.” Rush
won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Recording in 1999 for “Any
Place I’m Going,” and he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of
Fame in 1984. In one of his final appearances on stage at the
Chicago Blues Festival in 2016, Rush watched beneath a black Stetson hat
from a wheelchair as he was honored by the city of Chicago, according
to the Chicago Tribune. He is survived by his wife Masaki Rush,
eight children and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren,
according to a family statement.
Otis Rush Jr. (April 29, 1934 – September 29, 2018)[1] was an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter. His distinctive guitar style featured a slow-burning sound and long bent notes. With qualities similar to the styles of other 1950s artists Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, his sound became known as West Side Chicago blues and was an influence on many musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, Peter Green and Eric Clapton.
Rush was left-handed and strummed with his left hand while
fretting with his right. His guitars, however, were strung with the low E
string at the bottom, in reverse or upside-down to typical guitarists.[2]
He often played with the little finger of his pick hand curled under
the low E for positioning. It is widely believed that this contributed
to his distinctive sound. He had a wide-ranging, powerful tenor voice.[3]
Rush moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1949[5] and after being inspired by Muddy Waters made a name for himself playing in blues clubs on the South and West Side of the city. From 1956 to 1958, he recorded for independent label Cobra Records and released eight singles, some featuring Ike Turner or Jody Williams on guitar.[3] His first single, "I Can't Quit You Baby", in 1956 reached number 6 on the Billboard R&B chart.[5] During his tenure with Cobra, he recorded some of his best-known songs, such as "Double Trouble" and "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)."[6] Cobra Records went bankrupt in 1959, and Rush signed a recording contract with Chess Records in 1960.[3]
He recorded eight tracks for the label, four of which were released on
two singles that year. Six tracks, including the two singles, were later
included on the album Door to Door in 1969, a compilation also featuring Chess recordings by Albert King.[7] Rush went into the studio for Duke Records in 1962, but only one single, "Homework" backed with "I Have to Laugh", was issued by the label.[8] It was also released in Great Britain as Vocalion VP9260 in 1963. In 1965, he recorded for Vanguard; these recordings are included on the label's compilation album Chicago/The Blues/Today! Vol. 2. Rush began playing in other cities in the United States and in Europe during the 1960s, notably with the American Folk Blues Festival.[9] In 1969, his album Mourning in the Morning was released by Cotillion Records. Recorded at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the album was produced by Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites (then of the band Electric Flag). The sound incorporated soul music and rock, a new direction for Rush.[10]
In 1971, Rush recorded the album Right Place, Wrong Time in San Francisco for Capitol Records,
but Capitol did not release it. The album was finally issued in 1976,
when Rush purchased the master from Capitol and had it released by P-Vine Records in Japan. Bullfrog Records released it in the United States soon after.[3] The album has since gained a reputation as one of his best works.[11][12] He also released some albums for Delmark Records and for Sonet Records in Europe during the 1970s, but by the end of the decade he had stopped performing and recording.[3]
Rush performing in 2002
Rush made a comeback in 1985 with a U.S. tour and the release of a live album, Tops, recorded at the San Francisco Blues Festival.[13]
He released Ain't Enough Comin' In in 1994, his first studio album in 16 years.[3][6]Any Place I'm Goin' followed in 1998, and he earned his first Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album
in 1999. Rush did not record a new studio album after 1998 but he
continued to tour and perform until 2003, when he suffered a stroke. In
2002, he was featured on the Bo Diddley tribute album Hey Bo Diddley – A Tribute!, performing the song "I'm a Man", produced by Carla Olson. Rush's 2006 album Live...and in Concert from San Francisco, a live recording from 1999, was released by Blues Express Records.[3] Video footage of the same show was released on the DVD Live Part 1 in 2003.[14]
In June 2016, Rush made a rare appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival
in Grant Park. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel honored Rush's appearance
by declaring June 12 to be Otis Rush Day in Chicago. Due to his ongoing
health problems Rush was unable to play, but celebrated on the
sidelines with his family who stood around him.[15]
Awards
Rush was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1984.[2] In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked Rush number 53 on its 100 Greatest Guitarists list.[16] The Jazz Foundation of America
honored Rush with a Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2018 "for a
lifetime of genius and leaving an indelible mark in the world of blues
and the universal language of music."[17]
Death
Rush died on September 29, 2018, from complications of a stroke. His death was announced on his website by his wife Masaki.[1] Gregg Parker, CEO and a founder of the Chicago Blues Museum said
of Rush: "He was one of the last great blues guitar heroes. He was an
electric god".[18] Writing in The New York Times,
Bill Friskics-Warren said, "A richly emotive singer and a guitarist of
great skill and imagination, Mr. Rush was in the vanguard of a small
circle of late-1950s innovators, including Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, whose music, steeped in R&B, heralded a new era for Chicago blues."[19]
THE
MUSIC OF THE OTIS RUSH: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH OTIS RUSH:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Rush made a comeback in 1985 with a U.S. tour and the release of a live album, Tops, recorded at the San Francisco Blues Festival.[13]
