In 1962 two German promoters, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, sensed a commercial opportunity to present a yearly blues package tour to European audiences that would run for the next nine years and then have a renaissance in the eighties. They brought over a collection of some of the finest African American blues musicians on the USA scene. Legendary names over the years included T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, Son House and Skip James.
These blues performers were transplanted from performing in loud American neighborhood bars and plunged into playing in concert halls and theaters designed for hosting operas and classical music concerts with perfectly designed acoustics and silent and sophisticated European audiences. These audiences would sit stony faced, dressed up for an up-market concert experience sitting silently and focusing on the stage and concentrating on every single note sung and played by each artist – like they would an opera singer, orchestra or string quartet.
All the artists got a rapturous reception, but in the 1963 tour one artist stood out above the rest, for the critics and the audiences alike. The undisputed star of the show was blues harmonica master Sonny Boy Williamson. When we look at the video footage today, some of these classic blues artists noticeably struggle to relax and work the highly formalised situation and with much less volume but far more detail than a bar gig would require. Not Sonny Boy, Sonny Boy flourished in these conditions. He captivated these huge, sophisticated and deadly quiet audiences by holding back when playing and singing. When he performed it wasn’t a just thoughtless surge of incredible musical talent. The spine-chilling musical magic came from the knife edge tension he created by restraining himself and trying to play as few notes as possible but infusing each note with as much musical thought and sensitivity (rhythmical, textural, dynamic, tonal and emotional) as he could.
He seemed, when performing, to be as much trying to fascinate himself as fascinate the audience and all the while hiding this complexity behind a couldn’t care less attitude – a classic ironical double bluff that the audience was subtly informed of by the not unaware glint in his eye. His approach was described by no less than The Sunday Times as “Perfect artistry” and by a European newspaper reviewer from Strasbourg described him as “Homo Ludens (the spirit of play) in human form”.
Sonny Boy stayed on in Europe after the tour had finished and continued working across Europe with the trio of pianist Memphis Slim, guitarist Matt Guitar Murphy and drummer Billie Stepney. In November 1963 all of Sonny Boy’s artistic qualities described above, and more, were captured in a marathon recording session for Denmark’s Storyville Records in the Copenhagen studio of sound engineer Ivar Rosenberg which was located in a small cinema.
I think they recorded about 19 tracks in one evening which were split over several releases during the following years and the critics went wild at the time – Paul Oliver, the famous Blues writer, considered the recordings Sonny Boy’s best, and there were rave reviews in the British Jazz and Blues magazines. The best compilation of the recordings was by Bruce Igluaer of Alligator Records who called his release in the early 1990s “Keep It To Ourselves”. It has since been described as one of the best sounding blues records of all time and had audiophile releases on 200g vinyl.
I first heard Sonny Boy’s harmonica introduction to the album’s first track, ‘The Sky Is Crying’, when I was nineteen years old I got shivers and was captivated by the intimate musical and emotional detail of the whole album. This is an up close album with the feel and dynamics of classical chamber music or low volume jazz reflecting the live experience of what was being played in the concert halls.