THRUSDAY
1:00 PM Big John Dickerson
4:00 PM J.B. Ritchie
Guitarist Special arrived as cofounder of Big Twist & the Mellow Fellows and stuck it out with that popular group until shortly after Twist’s untimely demise in 1990. While most of the other Fellows now do business as the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings, who’ve backed several vocalists now, Special sings in front of his own outfit; unfortunately his gravelly voice and derivative guitar style were more tolerable coming from a sideman. (BD)
Drummer, actually a keyboardist and singer who’s been around since the 70s, has recently come to anchor weekends at Lee’s Unleaded Blues lounge on South Chicago Avenue, where the parade of guest artists routinely turns Saturday nights into compact chitlin’-circuit soul reviews. As a vocalist he’s best with medium-tempo ballads and traditional 12-bar shuffles; as an accompanist he plays a lot of chords. But while his occasional churchy solos are light on technique, they’re shot through with deep blues feeling. (DW)
2:00 PM Blues in the Schools with Erwin Helfer & Katherine Davis
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The ongoing degeneration of Chicago’s north-side blues circuit into a tourist-and-conventioneer-driven cash cow is eloquently personified by this popular act. Prior to embracing the blues, Jordan sang behind Tom Waits on Frank’s Wild Years and Urge Overkill on their 1991 Supersonic Storybook–neat, but these are hardly luminaries of her adopted genre. While she’s admittedly got prodigious pipes, she’s apparently content to use them in portraying the cliched bawdy, blues-belting mama: the music in her overworked repertoire seems to emanate from no place deeper than her campy vintage costumes. (BD)
