The blues are the foundation for rock and roll, and much of what has followed in popular music. The world of what is termed classical music has also benefited from ideas from musicians from the Delta. Gershwin (“Rhapsody in Blue”) Copland (“Piano Concerto”) from America, and Ravel and Stravinsky from beyond, were also beguiled, and they in turn fascinated us with their works. Artists fluent and proficient in the language of jazz and the blues may have combined their studies with a formal “Classical” training, which may have been the only form of musical higher education available, particularly in the first half of the 20th Century. W.C. Handy, The Father of the Blues, could teach classical music, and many artists have been exceptionally proficient in both art forms, up to Wynton Marsalis today.
What there has not been is many experiences where the blues and classical orchestra forms have been directly combined. Different audiences, different venues, different approaches to dancing in the aisles.
Morgan Freeman has made it one of his missions to change this. Starting with some concerts and tours, the Oscar-winning actor has worked to bring the form to audiences in the US, and he has now curated an album combining stars of the world of blues with a leading classical orchestra. Fittingly, as the blues has sometimes crossed the Atlantic more readily than the Mason-Dixon line, he has teamed up with leading British classical exponents, The Chineke! Orchestra.
The tone is set early, as Freeman sonorously intones his love of the blues in a spoken introduction, the sound of a single French horn rises like a great blue heron from the Delta. What follows is a glorious, riotous celebration. From the works of Robert Johnson, The Staples Singers, and contemporary blues artist Anthony “Big A” Sherrod through to a track from the magnificent movie Sinners, the history and the present of the blues is captured by a stunning assemblage.
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This should have been a belter.
