Danny Kalb
by
Sean Wilentz
Sweltering, Brooklyn in July -- beyond the brownstone rows, projects, and stooped tenements -- has oases of backyard gardens strung along thickly tree-lined streets that run down to the beaches and the bay. Though it’s still hot, it’s easier to breathe out there than in the city – even the subway lines come up for air – and at night, with only a few streetlamps burning dimly, it feels a little like the country. Unless you pay attention, it’s easy to get lost.
Last summer, in one of those gardens, the Danny Kalb Trio lit up the neighborhood. The buzz was audible from a block away (my lost gypsy cabdriver got me there a little late and a little off-target): the music simmering, not blasting; the audience yipping and applauding not raucously but invitingly, like a smooth carney barker. A master guitarist and performer, fronting two masterly friends, was cooling out the place with the blues, playing with that hope, overcoming sorrow, that the writer Albert Murray once called “stomping.” Rounding the garden fence, I picked up a beer, dodged one of the kids running back toward the house, and settled in for a joyous evening.
It had been a long time, nearly forty years, since I first heard Danny play -- me scrunched inside the Café au Go Go in Greenwich Village with some Brooklyn high school friends. The Blues Project was all the rage then. To us, Danny and his bandmates were beyond stardom; they were where we all wanted to be, as close to the abyss of hipness as we dared to go without falling in. It was loud inside the club, the quarters like ship’s steerage, the mood drenched in a mixture of satin-shirt psychedelia and solid, juiced-up blues.
Now, half a lifetime later, there was a summer softness, even sweetness in the air, as the Kalb band played the blues, with some Jimmie Rodgers songs and other pieces from the grab-bag thrown in for good measure. Danny fretted and picked with the kind of understanding that makes every single day precious after sundown, no matter how sad or happy the day has been. This was the grown-up blues, played by a man much older now than Muddy Waters and Danny’s other old masters and teachers were back in 1966.
There are some musical insiders who say that Danny Kalb is performing better than ever, his guitar work even more proficient, his ur-urban ‘60’s blues revival voice darker and more moving. This, of course, is saying a great deal. I recently heard a tape of Kalb playing what I imagine was his first gig, in Madison, Wisconsin, in around 1960, and was amazed at how accomplished he already was. He’d learned his lessons well at the University of Washington Square Park, and from his mentor, Dave Van Ronk – but even so, he was only 18 years old! (From what shtetl did the kind of genius come that also came from wherever the Van Ronk family hailed, and from West Africa, and from the West of Ireland, and from Lord knows where else? Or could the talent come from anywhere, turning into genius only on American soil, from Coahoma County, Mississippi, to Westchester County, New York?).
I think the insiders are right. In my corner of the arts and sciences, even the greatest mathematicians and physicists are supposed to be used up by the time they reach 30, maybe 40. After that, they teach and, if they’ve discovered something stupendous, await the ‘phone call from Stockholm’. Writing history, by contrast (or so I like to hope) is an older person’s game. No matter how good you are when you’re young, you can’t get really good until you’ve lived through an accumulation of joys and suffering which, through the awful grace of human existence, becomes the wisdom required to understand the past, to feel it. If a historian keeps body and soul together, it’s possible to keep going, getting better and better, ‘til the tomb door opens.
I imagine it’s the same way with most musicians, not least those who would play the blues. You can hear it in the records of Muddy Waters who, great as he was in 1942, became hotter, sexier, wiser as he grew up: no longer a mannish boy. You can hear it in the later records of Alberta Hunter, who was better at 82 (to my ear) than she was at 25 – not just a phenomenon of preservation, but a wiser woman. You can hear it in dozens of other blues singers, and here I’d include Van Ronk who, for all his shortness of breath from those damned cigarettes, played and sang as he grew older as he couldn’t have during his Gaslight Café days and nights.
The same is true for Danny Kalb, who unlike so many of his amazing cohort of kindred spirits from forty years ago has lived to tell the tale. How do I know? I don’t know how I know. I just hear it, as I heard it last summer. Yes, Danny has found superb accompanists, in Bob Jones and Mark Ambrosino, who beautifully complement his playing, and that’s important. He’s gathered up subtle harmonic tricks and chordings and vocal inflections to a fare thee well. (The man never stopped practicing!!), But that can’t explain how I know how I felt last summer hearing him play even the tag end of his take on “Can’t Be Satisfied,” his musical chops gleaming like the back of his sweating, balding head. It can’t explain the symphonics of his current reworking Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” strong enough to wake Duane Allman (or, for that matter, Willie McTell) from the dead. It can’t explain how he now plays, “Alberta,” one of the songs that first made him his name along MacDougal Street – a new version that obliterates the old one.
This above all: I defy anybody to listen to Danny’s “Shake Sugaree” without weeping the deep weep that cleanses, the weep of loss that leaves you limp but also stronger, and that helps keep you going – a delicate new version of Libba Cotten’s old song that no prodigy could have imagined.
My second beer done, tears wiped away, I had to leave the show early in order to catch the late train back to Jersey. Wandering the streets, I got lost again, but found the subway in the nick of time, only by listening for a loudening screech and rumble of the elevated line that had punctuated Danny’s songs at what uncannily seemed all the right moments. (You can hear the clatter on this recording, in the distance -- definitely not the L. & N. or the Illinois Central, but the Q train). It was a lucky night for me, and a few dozen other people. But tonight’s your lucky night, because you can buy this CD, take it home, and discover how the brand new, older Danny Kalb and his friends sounded when they stomped the blues and swayed the garden last July in Brooklyn, sweltering.
-Sean Wilentz, Professor of American History, Princeton University.
Author of liner notes to current Bob Dylan “Live at the Gaslight” 1962 and “Live at Philharmonic Hall” 1964.
Author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln ”, Norton 2005
Recording Engineers Ross Procaccio and Julian Beale