In the 1980s, the decade in which I was in my adolescent years (I’m from ’69), I sometimes stayed with my cousin in Santpoort-Zuid, who was a little older than me, just like in my childhood. I myself was, partly because of him, enormously ‘into Elvis’ and from there I came to the others, like Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Johnny Cash and Little Richard. Week in, week out I went digging through the Vara-guide at home in search of the rare broadcasts of and about that music; in the week of August 16, the date Elvis died in 1977, everything had to give way to everything that was often broadcast on television in that week about, with and about Elvis; often moved to tears I let myself be sucked into the countless docu’s, films, that were still being broadcasted by the station bosses at that time. From my love for this, even then, “old shit” arose my total lack of musical connection with my peers. Where almost everyone walked around with Doe Maar buttons, I walked around with Elvis buttons on my jeans jacket. At disco parties, the most hip thing I requested was Shakin’ Stevens or the band RaceyDuring one of the sleepovers at my great nephew’s house, during which we played games, exchanged (not so) cool stories and listened to his cassette tapes of the aforementioned for us ‘usual suspects’ in the background, ‘something’ came along that immediately caught my attention. A rather slow song came along, with something in between that I couldn’t pinpoint at the time. Someone was playing something in between the vocal lines, of which I thought and especially felt ‘how can you play so many different tones/notes as filler so beautifully and still keep coming out before the other person starts singing again?’ What was that? And especially, who was that?No, the Internet was nowhere near then and the music was on a cassette tape compiled by someone. So no cover, no name, no expert, no idea…. (I myself only played recorder at a pretty high level and by now only owned a guitar)
I can’t quite remember how I found out about it at the time. Perhaps cousin-love knew his sources. Maybe he recorded it from the radio, or had someone around him who recorded the tapes for him? In any case, I found out pretty quickly anyway that the musician of that song was named Muddy Waters. But then again, who was it that crammed those “dings” so perfectly timed between the vocal lines? It turned out to be piano, so from the pianist, and in that recording that was a musician named Otis Spann. In retrospect, I think I went into the Heemsteedse library’s record collection armed with the name Muddy Waters and found out on a record cover that one of Muddy’s pianists was Otis Spann. In that library, in my memory, they had quite a large collection of records. You could rent a record for three weeks for 50 cents or 1 guilder (double-LP). At home you would transfer the record to a cassette tape. And during homework there was always time for that….
And the best part was that you could compile your own ‘collectors’.Indeed, Muddy Waters with his Otis Spann was the starting point of my interest in blues music. Thinking back to the gems I rented from the library back then, quite a nice list of musicians and LPs come to mind, all of which I would like to discuss here, including my first vocal inspiration Luke “Longgone Miles. But fair=fair, my crossover from country and Rock ‘n roll to the blues, was at that time, that song, on that cassette tape at my cousin’s house. The Muddy Waters Blues Band featuring Otis Spann. I rented the LP “Portraits in Blues” by Otis Spann. Now, retroactively, there are a few key moments in my life for me that, coincidentally or not, have a link to this, who died in 1970 (age 41), Otis Spann. Indeed, I heard on this LP that Otis Spann was truly a master on the piano. Boogie Woogie was familiar to me (‘Boogie Woogie, Rob Hoeke), but blues piano is really something else then. What a timing, what a sound, what a voice. The first song on this LP by Spann is “Goodmornin’ Mr. Blues.” (Goodmornin’ Mr. Blues, blues how do you do?…)I make a small leap in time: it is now the late 80s (87 or 88?); in the illustrious Haarlem Jazz Club there is a jam session on Sunday, led by, among others, pianist Ed Comaita (with whom I formed my first serious band ‘A Crossroads Deal’ in 1993). It was a hot summer day and I had resolved, since it would probably be fairly quiet because of the heat and vacation season, to consider speaking to the session leader and perhaps daring to ask him to sing a song. Terrified, I thought, but I wanted it so badly. Before the session started at 3 p.m., I was inside the cluttered but oh so atmospheric jazz club. “Sir, could I maybe sing a song later?”; I had asked …, I had just done it. Point of no return….pffff. But as scary as I thought it was all, I was prepared to the teeth. I was going to do two songs: the first was a song I knew by now from the Muddy Waters Blues Band, “Everything’s gonna be alright.” The great thing about this song was, and still is, that halfway through it is vocally taken over by guitarist/singer Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson (with this Luther I almost did a tour in Europe over 30 years later…). I have continued to do this song in about 95% of my performances ever since, as a kind of tribute to this first moment on stage.So the second song was the wonderful “Goodmornin’ Mr. Blues” by Otis Spann. I had done it; I had sung two songs at THE Haarlem Jazz Club. I’ll never forget that afterwards a woman (Nellie was her name) came up to me and said, “Boy, you really do have a beautiful voice, but you shouldn’t wear that pink shirt anymore”; I suddenly felt like that Heemsteedse boy again, who found that raucous club so exciting anyway, but I took the compliment to heart and formed the basis to continue doing what I had been dreaming of for so long: singing, singing blues.But also later Otis Spann came back at a special time in a special way: In 2016 I won the Dutch Blues Challenge together with the only 16-year-old keyboardist Dave Warmerdam and we were allowed to represent the Netherlands as a duo at the prestigious International Blues Challenge in Memphis in early 2017. I had also experienced it there in Memphis in 2013 and knew that by drawing lots a number of non-American acts were allowed to present themselves there in a so-called showcase. In 2013, I had been allowed to do that in the beautiful little historic theater on Bealestreet, The Daisy Theatre. Now, in 2017, the draw was also exciting again. I had a set list of 5 songs for the Challenge. Because of my fondness for and “history with” Otis Spann, a song by him was also on the list.The second LP of his I once rented from the Heemsteedse library was called “Half ain’t been told,” an original of which I still have in front of me on the table as I write this. Otis Spann made a number of quite similar songs in style, including “Half ain’t been told,” “Sad day in Texas,” about the assassination of President Kennedy and “Hotel Lorraine,” about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. All wonderful songs. The last song, “Hotel Lorraine,” was on our set list for Memphis. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel as it was officially called. So my fondness for Otis Spann and this link to Memphis (Spann lived in Chicago) brought this song to the set list. And on top of that, I knew young Dave Warmerdam could play it incredibly well on piano.And now it comes:
That year, 2017, a new venue had apparently been added for the showcases, in addition to the usual other eight venues in Downtown Memphis: The Clayborne Temple, an old somewhat dilapidated church, with a big, old creaky wooden stage and peeling walls. A building with a huge history…
In this church, Dr. Martin Luther King “practiced” his famous speeches to an audience, including the most famous “I have a dream. You might have guessed? The draw worked out doubly well for us: we indeed got to present ourselves to the International audience in this showcase the Tuesday before the start of the International Blues Challenge, but…. We also drew this beautiful historic venue in Memphis, knowing that we had the very unknown song “Hotel Lorraine” stupidly on the set list. That’s how magical it was to do that song, on that stage, in that city….And so I consider Otis Spann to be one of my main ‘Circles of life’….