Posted on: Friday, December 27, 2002

Got those blues? Prepare for year's focus on music

• Big names on board for yearlong salute to blues

By Edna Gundersen
USA Today

Muddy Waters and other blues pioneers will by saluted in films and on CDs during the Year of the Blues. Advertiser library photo

After seeping from swamps, deltas and juke joints in the 20th century, the blues finally gets a prominent pop-culture pedestal.

Year of the Blues, a partnership of Seattle's Experience Music Project, the Memphis-based Blues Foundation and various labels, museums, festivals and media outlets, is marshalling forces to stage music history's biggest salute to the humble genre.

The ambitious undertaking will tout the blues in film, TV, radio, publishing, cyberspace, exhibits, schools and concerts.

"The blues is probably the least-recognized form in American popular music, yet it gave birth to virtually every major pop and rock development in the 20th century, even contributing to country and classical," says Robert Santelli, blues historian and EMP director. "So much has been done on jazz and rock 'n' roll that we felt it was high time that the granddaddy of them all got exposure."

A benefit concert Feb. 7 and a fall PBS series of films by name-brand directors form the bookends of a yearlong campaign to explore blues not as fossilized history, but as a thriving force. There also will be a Web site, 13-part National Public Radio series, a companion book, a CD box set, soundtracks, classroom materials and a traveling exhibit produced by EMP. Artists on the YOTB advisory board range from veterans B.B. King and KoKo Taylor to torch bearer Bonnie Raitt and newcomer Shemekia Copeland.

The royal-blues treatment is long overdue, says Santelli, who hopes entertainment and educational lures will hook young listeners who haven't connected the dots from Beck to the Rolling Stones to Muddy Waters.

Martin Scorsese is executive producer of "The Blues," the PBS series of seven 90-minute films, the crown jewels of the 2003 blues marathon. Clips will be unveiled at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Series producer Alex Gibney ("The Fifties," "The Sexual Century") says the key to ensuring passionate filmmaking was the selection of blues-loving directors, including Scorsese, Mike Figgis and Wim Wenders.

Gibney, who also will oversee the benefit concert, CD output and other spinoffs, says the project's guiding principle lies in a quote from pioneer Willie Dixon: "The blues are the roots; everything else is the fruits."

For the kickoff concert Feb. 7 at New York's Radio City Music Hall, organizers are lining up seasoned blues artists ahead of better-known contemporary acts. "We want to serve notice and celebrate these people while they're still alive," Gibney says. "It's an opportunity to put the roots and the fruits together and show what they've wrought."

Regardless of the players, "we're going to make a big noise," Gibney promises.