Mahindra Blues Festival 2023, Mumbai

The blues live here. That is the profound tag line of the Mahindra Blues Festival (MBF), a line bestowed upon it by Buddy Guy who has been the patron saint of this annual festival in Mumbai. Sadly, it was interrupted, rather rudely by the awful pandemic that was a major worldwide spoilsport over the last few years.

The MBF returned triumphantly last weekend, February 11th and 12th, 2023 to Mumbai to its familiar venue at the iconic Mehboob Studios in Bandra. This venue, which is historically famous for several legendary motion pictures which have been filmed here, has added to the legend by being home to the Blues.

In any home, family gathers annually to meet each other and catch up with “the latest”; since the Blues Live Here, its Indian family members gathered at Mehboob Studio to catch up with each other and, more importantly with The Blues. This was the familiar annual get together.

We met people who had arrived for the festival from Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata Chennai, Goa, Pune and Nashik; there must have been visitors from elsewhere as well. The net result was a look of satisfaction on the faces of most of the folks who had undertaken this Blues pilgrimage. The family get together was a very satisfactory one.

Then, of course there was the music!

There was a balanced fare of different types of the Blues. There was the outgoing, flamboyant style of the Argentinian Ivan Singh and the earnest and sincere rendition from Arinjoy Sarkar, the classic Blues form as represented in the music of Taj Mahal on the opening day.

The man from Mississippi, the deep South of America, Christone Ingram, better known by his stage and recording name of Kingfish represented the home of the Delta Blues. On the second and concluding day of the festival, Kingfish livened up proceedings with his dexterity on the guitar and voice. And then there was Mr. Mahindra Blues himself, Buddy Guy. What can one say about his style much less describe it. If one listens only to his guitar play even before he sings the Blues, the uniqueness of this man is obvious. He seems to find the notes and sequence them in a way no one else can. His unique “fingerprint” is indelible and evident all over his music. Over the years and his several appearances at the MBF, Buddy Guy has embellished the event and raised its stature. It is a beautiful gesture that he has begun his farewell tour with the Mahindra Blues Festival.

The music in totality demonstrated how various very popular and dominant contemporary music genres have evolved. Many of them are heavily based on the blues form. If listening to the style of Kingfish evoked memories of the music of the Doors, Ivan Singh made forays into the music of Santana and even Michael Jackson without deviating from his own style of play. A lot of modern Western music owes its evolution to the blues.

Taj Mahal (given name Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr.) plays and sings the Blues in the style of his generation, actually the classic pre-electronic era style. “If you want to know where you are going, you need to know where you have come from” the great jazz musician Duke Ellington once said. To trace the curve of the blues sound in the last three or four decades, one needs to pay heed to Taj Mahal to know the antecedents of the modern blues sound.

In the Blues, as in jazz, the expression of the music comes from the life experience of the musician. “Live your Story” is the byline of the producers of MBF 2023 and it exemplifies exactly what the musicians bring to the table. We found out about the background, likes and dislikes of the quartet of the musicians who played at the festival to know a bit more about their music.

Taj Mahal was raised in Harlem, New York city but his family went to the U.S. from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in what we know as the West Indies. We asked him why he never sang about his sorrow or complain about his misery. He imitated a line “Hey, I’m so sad and lonely, nobody cares for me,” and laughed. “That’s not for me. I like to sing about happy, positive things in life. Why moan and groan?” When we asked why that was the case he said, “it’s the Caribbean background. Not that we didn’t have hard times growing up in Harlem, we just had a different attitude to our problems. Our experience was different.”

Taj Mahal was very keen on the music of jazz artists Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Milt Jackson and others. Asked how they influenced him, he said, “Milt Jackson was a good friend of mine and we often explored jazz chords and changes. These jazz guys are deeply into these areas of the music, they have to be very good at their instruments and think about arranging and adding to the sound.”

Closer to the blues sound were Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. We asked him about this duo and we heard that he was close to Stevie Wonder but also got to know Ray Charles, “An absolute genius.” He added without any further prompting, “Ray Charles made a great album at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival but his musical sense at making the album Modern Sounds in Country and Western music was brilliant; everyone said that it would be the end of his career but he proved them dead wrong! What an album! I still listen to it. In 1962, I took my whole band to hear Ray Charles in concert with his band. Told them they would learn a lot from the experience. I remember each of the band members to the last one to this day. There was Joe Newman on trumpet, Ray on piano, Dave “Fathead” Newman on saxophone, the three Raylets as the backup singers…” He named each musician and even imitated how the Raylets sang!

We mentioned to Taj that he had cut an album with jazz organist Jimmy Smith and he said it was the only one he recorded with a jazz musician, although it would have been fun to record some more.

So, what’s the big difference between the blues and jazz, we ask. With a smile and a twinkle in his eyes he says, “You’re trying to trick me, right? That’s not an easy answer. Jazz musicians get very involved in expression from their instruments or voices, get technical, get into arranging the music with the various sounds while we guys keep it simple.” So, we suggest that jazz is really the Blues with a higher education! He likes that and adds, “Like the blues went to school and came out as jazz!” We finally ask how he sings in such a variety of voices from the smooth to the gruff and some in between. He demonstrates the African style and the Caribbean style of singing and adds, “There’s so many ways of expressing a song, so we change the approach.”

Trying to find the man behind the Blues from Argentina, we had an interesting interface with Ivan Singh. He said his great grandfather, a Sikh from Punjab had left India to go to the ‘new world,’ ended up in Brazil from where he walked for three months to reach Argentina. (One assumes he was part of the Sikh exodus in the early 20th century which reached the west coast of Canada and the U.S.). A hundred years or so later, Ivan Singh comes to the land of his forefathers and is thrilled to be here.

So how does a South American from the land of the Tango get to be a Blues singer?

“Through records that my mother played at home, I got to hear the Blues and loved it; nobody around me knew anything about this music. I made my own guitar from an old tin box. I was the only Blues musician in my country at one time.” After getting invited to play at concerts in and around Argentina, Ivan got a break and played in the U.S.

His style is original, his guitar playing is also self-developed and the net result is a vibrant, exciting sound. He sings in Spanish and English. Where did he learn to speak such good English? “Never studied it, picked it up in my travels. Now I live in Chicago and it is getting better.” Have you composed anything for this festival, we ask. Pulls out his guitar and tries to simulate the bending of notes as on a sitar. “That’s like an Indian sound, isn’t it.” We suggest he slow down the process. He does and says, “Hey! that’s the blues, isn’t it?” We add that maybe the blues comes from India!

Ivan Singh has been mentored and even promoted by Buddy Guy. He has also singled out and mentored the other young blues man at the festival, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

It is so good to see this almost “guru – shishya” or teacher – student tradition, common in Indian classical music education, also present at this 2023 MBF with Buddy Guy and his two ‘discoveries’ Ivan Singh and Kingfish, all playing at the festival. They are both clearly in awe of their mentor.

Kingfish still lives in the American state of Mississippi and travels everywhere for his performances. He is just 24 years old and has already won awards and is seen as a future big star on the Blues scene. He has lived a hard life; his parents broke up early in his life and he has since lost his mother. He expresses his life through his music and this expression is the essence of the blues.

The Blues are an amazing, even miraculous expression. For over 200 years, the African Americans had been enslaved as a result of the despicable slave trade. Thousands upon thousands of Africans had been kidnapped, brought forcibly to the Americas, stripped of all human dignity, had no rights, were traded as commodities and used mercilessly as labour in the cotton fields and elsewhere. Ultimately, in America they were “freed” in the mid-1860s and slowly allowed to integrate into American society. And their response to these years of slavery? They give a gift to their old “masters,” the gift of the music they used to communicate with each other across the cotton fields. This was the gift of the Blues, perhaps the most significant “gift” there can be.

We are all blessed by this magnificent music. We are so glad the blues live here!

Sunil Sampat is a jazz critic and Contributing Editor of Rolling Stone India. Write to Sunil at jazzwala@gmail.com