Deep Dive from Blues Duo

Curtis Salgado harmonica and singing added color to both Robert Cray’s band and Roomful of Blues for years before he started making records on his own about 25 years ago. Five years after that, Salgado, who also has an attention-grabbing highly emotive blues voice, started playing with Portland-based guitarist Alan Hager. Just this week, the pair released Rough Cut, a stripped-down album featuring a half-dozen originals that blend seamlessly into the covers of blues classics such as Elmore James’s “You Got To Move”, Big Bill Broonzy’s “I Want You By My Side”, and Muddy Waters’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied”. Subjects range from personal loss and challenges to off-the-cuff funny, with the musical contexts covering acoustic blues duo to flat-out soul-shaking R&B.

Salgado and Hager headline the Santa Barbara Blues Society’s annual acoustic Member Appreciation Show at the New Vic Theatre on Saturday night, January 20. (Tickets are $10, or free for members.) He talked about Rough Cut and more over the phone earlier this week.

Q. You and Alan Hager seem very simpatico. Why does it work so well?

A. We just hit it off. It’s a common story, you hear it all the time. Why did The Beatles blend so well? They were just buddies. Nobody thought they’d last a week. So, you don’t have to understand, but me and Alan played together immediately. We speak the same language. Like a lot of baby boomer musicians, I grew up with parents who were hip jazz enthusiasts listening to Earl Hines and Ray Charles and Paul Butterfield when I was a kid. He did too. So, it comes easily. He was into blues even before he earned his master’s degree.

Over the last couple of albums you’ve shown a real knack for wordplay and clever turns of phrase, and not just in the so-called lighthearted songs. That’s pretty rare for the blues. Are you putting a lot of thought into crafting the songs now?

Yeah, that’s exactly it. Thank you so much. I am trying to be a songwriter. You know, back when I was younger, I really didn’t get Bob Dylan. I wanted somebody who played harmonica like Little Walter and sang like Sam Cooke. I didn’t get it. But one day the switch just came on. It was, oh, it’s this vibe he puts out and he’s an amazing lyricist. You can write volumes about his songs. That’s why I put that line about “I wish I wrote ”Blowin’ in the Wind’ on the last album. I want to be a real songwriter, as good as the people I admire. So, I’m trying.

You survived liver cancer in 2005, lung cancer a few years ago, and had quadruple bypass last year. But it only shows up in your music as material for songs. I mean, the first verse in your “Walk a Mile in My Blues” – which one Song of the Year last year – has more milestones than most people go through in a lifetime. It’s like you’re determined to win.

I’m just not the type of person who goes “Oh, woe is me.” I’m more “What is going on!?” I didn’t want to be known as an artist who had to deal with all this. I didn’t ask for it. But it does add to your character. You just pick yourself up and dust off and get back on the horse. That’s really all there is. Deal with ’em and then move on down the line… We all have stories around us.

“Going to Hell in a Hand Basket” reminded me of Mose Allison, and some of the other ones have a lot of John Hammond going on.

Yeah, sure. I was thinking more of Memphis Slim or the piano player from Casablanca. That kind of talking way of singing is what was on my mind. I’m a Hammond fan too. Alan used to play with John Fahey. So it was more like Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke. I wanted to make an elegant straight-ahead blues album, not the derivative cookie-dough monster that the kids who are coming up now are doing. They’re staying on the surface, not really digging into it. I saw all those blues masters when I was young. This is my wheelhouse. This is what I want to make. It was like “Here. This is how it’s done.” I’m not being pretentious. You just have to have that attitude.

Brothers in Song

The Talbott Brothers, another Portland-based acoustic duo albeit one with a hankerin’ for harmony rather than harmonica, are also headed our way this week. Nick and Tyler Talbott, who were born and raised in southwestern Nebraska before relocating to the Northwest, have the kind of blood harmonies that and infectious melodies inform Mumford and Sons. Catch them at SOhO on Tuesday, January 23.

Taking off for Laughs

There are so many genre mashups in the Comedy Strippers show, it’s hard to keep them all straight. The Canadian company combines a parody of a male strip show – the latter already a bit self-referential off-center – with improv games from middle-aged men. But that’s nothing compared to the full-length documentary film of their act they made not long after first hitting the road back in 2012, which then adds in the element of a nonfiction movie about a fictional troupe doing parody-improv. Even fellow Canadian Christopher Guest’s (This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show)head would spin.

“Yeah, a fake parody stripper group, but it isn’t as dumb an idea as it seemed,” said founder Roman Danylo, who came up with the idea after his wife came home from a real male strip show raving about how the audience went crazy. As a comic was looking for a new angle, Danylo figured, “Well, we’ve got torsos. We could do that. It was a whole genre of entertainment that nobody had done a parody of yet.” All three of his fellow Canadian comics immediately took to the idea of “doing a crazy parody version of a stripper show” and Comedy Strippers was born.

“We were all veterans of improv and knew that whipping off a shirt or dancing around always got huge reactions,” he recalled. “We figured a bunch of middle-aged guys with not-so-hot bodies would be even funnier.” The show sets it up as a weary strip troupe taking on improv games to improve their fortunes, so all of the sketches have “stripper-themed twists.” In essence, Danylo said, “it’s really a shirtless Whose Line is it Anyway? with goofy dancing.”

Emphasis on the goofy. There’s a dance number called “The Slug”. A thing with ping-pong balls shooting out of one performer’s mouth into another’s. And, for the first time in town to highlight the gang’s return – Friday night, January 19, at the Lobero – an original song. “With boy band moves,” Danylo said.

Emphasis also on the shirtless. It’s a parody-improv act, not a titillating strip show. The pants stay on. “No G-strings or anything like that,” Danylo said, adding that even though the audience is still 75 to 80 percent female, men are more than welcome and usually end up roaring as loudly as their dates.

“We’re not trying to turn anyone on. It’s all irony. Even the audience is pretending that we’re sexy. I mean, we’re all in our late 40s.”

As for the doc? That’s also related to the actors’ age.

“We got amazing reactions out of the gate, but we didn’t know how long we could do it, because it’s by far the most physically demanding show any of us have done. There are lots of visits to the chiropractor. So we just wanted to document it while we could. But it’s pretty good. And it’s free! At real stripper shows, they charge $20 or more just for photos with the cast. You get our whole movie for free!”

Classical Corner – Postponements and Updates

Due to the continued closure of Highway 101, the Santa Barbara Symphony’s pair of concerts that would have featured Canadian violinist Lara St. John performing Corigliano’s Academy Award-winning score for The Red Violin accompanying the film and conducted by guest Carolyn Kuan have been postponed until June. In its place, the community is invited to a free concert at 7:30 pm this Thursday, January 18, featuring guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas, the Spanish guitarist currently serving as the Symphony’s first-ever Artist-in-Residence, who will be accompanied by a small orchestra. Montecito Bank & Trust volunteers will be on hand to collect donations for disaster relief and recovery efforts. Tickets are available Wednesday at the Symphony office, 1330 State Street, suite 102, or at the door.

The year’s first Santa Barbara Music Club concert, postponed from last Saturday afternoon, is now slated to take place this Saturday, January 20, at 3 pm at the Faulkner Gallery. Bassoonist-composer-conductor Mathieu Lussier’s “Spring Lullaby” (2005) and Vivaldi’s Bassoon Concerto No. 23 in G minor, F. VIII, will be played by soloist Paul Mori and a string quartet comprising violinists Andrea Lárez and Mirah Ray, violist Erik Fauss, and cellist Timothy Beccue. Pianist Robert Hale, violinist Marie Hébert, and cellist Elizabeth Olson will also perform Brahms’s Piano Trio #1 in B major, Op. 8.

Quire of Voyces has also announced a Sunday, January 28, make-up date for its winter concerts that were canceled due to the Thomas Fire. The a cappella chorus’s annual “Mysteries of Christmas” will be adjusted to now encompass “A Healing Concert for our Community”, with traditional Christmas carols replaced by the Quire singing “music that soothes and heals.” Tickets purchased for the December 16-17 concerts will be honored, and seats will also be available at the door and in advance at the SBCC Garvin box office. Firefighters or other first responders will be admitted free.

Ready for Ligeti, Part 2

As of this writing, the Parker Quartet‘s recital at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Mary Craig Auditorium slated for this Thursday is still booked. The 15-year-old foursome that won the Concert Artists Guild Competition and nabbed the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, are something of specialists in György Ligeti, the contemporary Hungarian composer whose Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano was just performed by Camerata Pacifica at the Lobero last Friday night. The Parker’s Naxos recording of Ligeti’s complete works for string quartet won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. They’ll play his String Quartet No.1 Métamorphoses nocturnes along with Mozart’s B-flat major, K. 589 Quartet and Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in the 7:30 pm concert on Thursday, January 18.