This article appeared in the
July 11, 2003 Jewish Advocate.
Squawk Coffeehouse to
Celebrate Mai Cramer Legacy
By Susie Davidson
Advocate Correspondent
On Thursday, July 17, Squawk
Coffeehouse will host the second annual Mai Cramer Birthday Blues Fest in honor
of the July 10 birthday of “Boston Blues Queen” Cramer, who hosted
the WGBH-radio program "Blues After Hours" each Friday and Saturday
for 25 years. Cramer died at age 54 of breast cancer in February, 2002.
A New York native and daughter of
a classical pianist, Cramer grew up in a Jewish family infused with a love of
music. As a teenager, she would take the subway to the Apollo and other blues
haunts. The industrious Cramer went on to receive a bachelor's degree from the
University of Massachusetts, master's degrees from the London Film School and
Harvard School of Education, as well as a doctorate in education from Boston
University.
But blues rocked her world. She
supported this jones with a 10-year position at Digital Equipment Corporation,
and by teaching at Emerson, Northeastern, and Rhode Island College. In 1975,
while living in western Massachusetts where she was making films, she began a
blues show on WGRG. She moved to Boston and landed the Friday and Saturday
overnight show on WGBH in 1978, and hosted it for 25 years. Cramer introduced
Buddy Guy at the 1994 Newport Jazz Festival.
Other Jewish musicians who will
play at Squawk include Cramer's husband Peter Ward, as well as his brother,
Michael "Mudcat" Ward, and local pianist David Maxwell, who has
played with Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush,
James Cotton and others. Also appearing will be Boston jazz singer Shirley
Lewis and blues musician Grayson Hugh, as well as Lee Kidd and The
Squawk-and-Scroll Bluesband.
“It will be a tribute to Mai
and her contribution to the blues scene,” said Piaia, “not only in
Boston, but throughout New England.”
The no-smoke, no-drink Squawk
began as Naked City Coffeehouse in an Allston hallway in 1989. Housed since
1999 in the Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church at 1555 Mass. Ave. in Harvard
Square, the local institution has welcomed poets, musicians and performance
artists of all genres to perform at the open mic before and after each
week’s feature. Prominent folk artists such as Dar Williams, Jess Klein,
Mary Lou Lord, Vance Gilbert, Ellis Paul, Jim Infantino, and Jon Svetky,
comedic singer/songwriter Don White, African drummer Jamey Smythe, Cambridge
storyteller Brother Blue and Boston mime Billy Barnum began or have developed
their early careers at the venue, which is loyal to its performers as well.
Last week’s show celebrated the birthday of poet Diana Saenz and also
featured singer/songwriter Jill Gross
Squawk Magazine, a glossy rag
published irregularly, chronicles this special scene, which is run by Harvard
Square’s Intercontinental School of Foreign Languages head and Harvard
Divinity School graduate Lee Kidd, historical character actress Jessa Piaia and
self-described “Professor of Surrealism” and internationally
published cartoonist Mick Cusimano and local poet Richard Cambridge, who hosts
a Sunday night poetry series at Club Passim.
Maintaining the spirit of the Beat
50’s and hippie 60’s eras, the coffeehouse has featured period
notables such as Ed Sanders, John Sinclair, David Amram, Tuli Kupferberg of the
Fugs and poet Herschel Silverman. “We're a celebrative, rowdy,
rambunctious bunch,” said Kidd, who speaks 13 languages. “It makes
a great insurgent difference if you stand up and sing. We want to bop 'til we
drop.”
The July 10 "Midsummer Blues
Bash: A Tribute to Mai Cramer and Blues After Hours" will begin at 8:30
p.m. Squawk Coffeehouse is open each Thursday night from 9 p.m.-midnight. The
Harvard-Epworth is located between Harvard and Porter Squares, next to Harvard
Law School's Pound Hall. For info, visit https://www.angelfire.com/music/squawk/
or call 617-868-3661.
Photos of Mai Cramer:
http://www.realblues.com/maiobit.html
http://www.realblues.com/party2.html
http://www.realblues.com/photo21.html
http://www.realblues.com/home.html
scroll down:
http://www.nothinbutdablues.com/BluesNews/2002/Page14.html
photos of Peter Ward:
http://www.realblues.com/hifi.html
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/077/living/Kitsch_finds_its_niche_in_comedic_Jew_revue+.shtml
Squawk organizers Kidd, Piaia and
Cusimano at:
https://www.angelfire.com/music/squawk/press.html
Peter,
I need a paragraph or two on Mai's
Jewish background for ths article which I must submit by the end of this
weekend. The issue is that I'm not
sure when I'll have email as I'm on the road, but hopefully I will tomorrow in
Little Rock and/or Sat. in Nashville.
Please send whatever you can asap.
Please also include a sentence or two of your own Jewish info i.e. where
you grew up, if you were involved in any Jewish organizations or activities
then or now.
Also if there is a photo available
of Mai, please have it sent by Sunday or Monday to
editorial@thejewishadvocate.com (not this email, but a separate, blank one
please). Please note in the subject line that it's for Susie's article on the
Mai Cramer Blues Fest.
Thanks again,
Susie
petermward@aol.com
Hi Peter,
here's the forwarded message from
Susie D., writer for The Jewish Advocate article on the 2nd annual Mai Cramer
Birthday Blues Celebration at Squawk Coffeehouse on 7/17/03.
She is survived by her husband,
Peter Ward, of Melrose, and a sister, Carol, of New York. At press time, WGBH
was scheduled to air tributes to Cramer in the morning and evening on
Wednesday, February 27, and another, featuring music and interviews from
artists she loved, on Friday, March 8, at 9 p.m. The date has yet to be
announced for a live Cramer-tribute show at the House of Blues. A memorial
service is scheduled for Saturday, March 30, from 2 to 4 p.m., at the
Universalist Church, 70 West Emerson, in Melrose. -- (Excerpted) BY JON
GARELICK
Ronnie Earl
The blues guitar virtuoso talking
about his life, music and the Colour of Love.
You started your career rather
late in life, your early twenties, how was that?
I grew up in New York City. I
bought my first real guitar in 1973 which was first a Martin acoustic, then the
next day I went back and traded it in on a Fender Stratocaster. Basically,
living in New York City, I was going to see a lot of people with my father,
people like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie. Also, by chance, I
went to the Fillimore East and I saw Albert King and B. B. King. Maybe a couple
of months later I went up to Boston on a vacation and I saw Muddy Waters. He
was playing for a week at this place called the Jazz Workshop, a very small
club. That was it, I was completely turned on to the blues.
The only advantage, and I’ve
had many years to reflect on this, of starting late, is that I was very, very
focussed. I never played Rock “N” Roll, I never played Rock, Chuck
Berry music, I didn’t play The Ventures. It was blues right off the bat!
I took a trip to Chicago, Koko Taylor is a dear friend, and she took me around
to all the clubs in Chicago. I got my education.
I have a degree in Special
Education, I worked with retarded children and adults, so I was starting to
play at night and teach early in the morning. It became very difficult to do
both, and so I finally went on the road, for about seven months, with this band
John Nicholas and the Rhythm Rockers. It took me to Texas, which took me to
being with Jimmy Vaughan, who I stayed with for maybe six weeks.
It doesn’t feel to me like I
started late, it feels to me I’ve been doing it the whole of my life. I
think the music was in me from when I came out of the womb.
Fairly soon you replaced Duke
Robillard in The Roomful Of Blues, which was a pretty significant outfit and
you did a lot of touring with that, didn’t you?
I was with them for eight years,
it was a difficult eight years. You can never really replace anyone. He’s
Duke and I’m Ronnie and it’s still that way to this day. We
don’t sound like one another, he has his own voice and I have mine. I
have a lot of respect for him. It was a difficult time for me also because I
was really into drugs and alcohol at that time.
Is that what caused you to
leave Roomful of Blues, did it come to a crisis?
It was one of the reasons. I just
couldn’t keep up with life. We were constantly touring for economics,
there were ten or nine people in the band. We were burning up. It was also time
for me to leave because I’m a composer. I write most of my own material
and that part of me wasn’t being used. I was making my own solo albums
even when I was in that band.
You don’t sing at all.
Have you ever sung or been pushed to sing?
I’ve been pushed to sing. On
a rare, rare occasion, I might, on a radio show or something, but my voice is
on the guitar. The last five or six albums have been without vocals, except The
Colour of Love, which has a vocal by Greg Allman.
Looking back over your albums,
it looks like you felt you needed a “front” man, vocalist early on
and later in your career you had the confidence to step out and say “I
can do it without that”. Is that how it was?
It was, to be honest, it was very
scary and courageous, looking back on it. Especially for someone who’s a
blues oriented player, like myself. I just decided one day that I
couldn’t express myself enough around a vocalist. I also realised that it
put me in a certain bag because most of these vocalists played harmonica. I
also realised my songs were actual songs and that most of my favourite
musicians, in keeping with what I listened to before, were jazz musicians, like
Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Pharaoh Sanders and Wes Montgomery. They didn’t
have singers. It made perfect sense to me but I don’t know if it made
perfect sense to the rest of the world. They had to come around. I tell my
manager, who’s Pat Metheny’s manager, another guitarist who
doesn’t sing, that a lot of people didn’t want to get me to the
stage. They’d say “well we love Ronnie’s playing but I
don’t know if this’ll work”. As soon as I did get to the
stage there was never any doubt that this worked. And it’s been working
for six years.
I’m interested, looking
at your new album, it’s quite jazzy in many ways. It sounds like
you’re returning to your roots rather than making a progression from
blues to jazz. Is that how it feels to you?
In a way it does. It’s
really all the same music. When I play I’m closing my eyes and I’m
exposing my soul and whether it’s a ballad or a heavy slow blues or a
stomp, it feels all the same. When I play “Around Midnight”,
that’s a blues to me. It’s just music. The labels kinda fall by the
wayside after a while.
Many would agree with you.
You’re now with a bigger label than you’ve been with before, Verve,
and you’ve new producer is Tom Dowd, who’s got an incredible track
record, from Ornette Coleman through to Eric Clapton and The Cream. Was that
your choice of producer or did Verve come up with that?
He was my choice of producer.
Did it make a difference to
your work?
I think it did. He understands the
guitar. He understands this kind of roots type music because he did Aretha and
he did King Curtis, and Booker T and the Allman Brothers and Eric Clapton.
I’m very traditional. I don’t use a whole lot of effects – I
don’t use any effects, actually.
On your last album
there’s an interesting mixture of dedications. Are you trying to be
stylistic when you’re making these dedications or is it just a homage to
someone you admire?
It is a homage. There’s a
whole lot of homages to be made. Every album I try to pay homage to some of the
people who set the plate for everybody to eat at.
You’ve got an odd
mixture, you’ve got Albert Collins, Peter Green, Jimmy Vaughan. They seem
more on the Rock end of blues. There’s no old time people in there, are
there?
Other albums, going back to my
second album, was dedicated to Muddy waters, my third album was dedicated to
Big Walter Horton and Earl Hooker. Peter Green, was really an incredible, and
still can be, a Chicago style blues guitarist, who later got into Rock.
I’m mostly in love with the period where he recorded with Otis Spann and
the early Fleetwood Mac albums, where he played the living daylights out of
blues guitar. I have some live recordings of him in 1967 when it was not even
called Fleetwood Mac. I feel a sort of affinity towards him because we’re
both Jewish, His real name is Greenbaum. Jimmy Vaughan is another one of the
greatest blues guitarists of all time. I used to see him back in 1976, way back
before even the records were being made.
I agree with you, particularly
about Peter Green. Have you heard his new album? He’s now playing again
in England.
Yes, I have
It’s not like the old
stuff, is it…
No. But I think it’s just a
beautiful miracle from God that he came out of the depths and is playing and is
happy. I’ve never seen him play but I’ve talked to him on the phone
and I had a nice conversation with him. He told me that he was feeling really good.
It’s hard for him to sound like he used to. It’s hard for me to
sound like I used to.
Buddy Guy has the same problem,
People want him to sound like he did when he did those Chess recordings but
he’s somewhere else now.
I know what you’re saying. I
can actually go back and sound like I sounded, My tone is not that different
from my first album.
I also wanted to tell you that
when I talked about having a hard time with drugs and alcohol with Roomful of
Blues, it was just the other day I celebrated nine years of being clean and
sober. I’ve had this band for ten years. It did happen relatively soon
after I left Roomful of Blues. Of course, they weren’t the reason. I just
got into the eighties. It seems like there was cocaine and alcohol everywhere.
I’m just so happy to be free of all that now. You don’t have to
live the blues to have a full rich life. You can play good music without drugs
and alcohol.
An excellent message Ronnie.
Unfortunately it was all too common in those days. Some people succumbed to it
and some people, like Clapton got out of it. There have been quite a few
deaths.
Yes, a lot of deaths and
it’s still going on today. In the United States it’s very
prevalent. By the Grace of God I was able to get pulled out of the fire.
That’s why I’m able to got to Australia and New Zealand, today.
Is there a message about this
in your music? Do you need to say something with jazz that you can’t say
with blues, something about happiness that doesn’t come across with
blues?
Oh, I think it comes across in all
of the music I play. Blues is very happy and very healing, because it’s
very soulful, depending on the player. The first part of your question is
absolutely right. Yes, I’m trying very hard for glimpses of spirituality
to project in my music.
Your only New Zealand
performance is at The Powerstation in Auckland. What are we going to hear
– is it your regular touring band?
You’re gonna hear a band
that I started out with twenty years ago. I have Anthony Jalowski on piano and
B3 organ, Michael “Mudcat” ward on acoustic and electric bass and
Mark Greenberg is our drummer. I’m gonna play music from a lot of my
albums, most of my albums that don’t have singing, of course.
I’m very much looking
forward to coming. I wish I was going tomorrow. We’re only staying for
one day?
You’ve got one
performance, yes…
I hope I get a chance to see the country a little bit…