Danny Kalb for The Record (Troy, New York) 8 23 07

By Don Wilcock

Danny Kalb is playing electric guitar on Sunday at Take Me to The River at Riverfront Park in Troy. He gets angry when I make a big deal about the distinction between acoustic and electric. “It’s not about electric vs. acoustic,” he says. “It’s about evolution toward whatever is coming up on the plate spiritually, Don!”

Never mind that Kalb single handedly shifted the way electric rock and blues guitarists looked at plugging in with his work as leader of the seminal New York City band The Blues Project. And he did it in a compressed period of time between 1965 and ’67. Sure, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band may have introduced the masses to the idea of plugging in to American roots music, but the Stones were as much about rock as they were about blues roots. The Dead were not focused on any one style enough to change the general public’s guitar paradigm, and Elvin Bishop and Michael Bloomfield in the Butterfield band followed a script laid down by the post-war electric blues guitarists frequenting the South and West Side bars in Chicago.

“My style on electric has always been kind of unorthodox,” says Kalb in an infrequent burst of understatement. “My soloing patterns don’t come out of the B. B. King tradition. I come out of my own take on Chuck Berry to Bo Diddley to Muddy Waters to my own stuff to the country blues to Dave Van Ronk all mish-mashed together and coming out of me.”

Jorma Kaukonen and John Hammond, both contemporaries of Kalb, have been uneasy talking to me about their electric playing. Hammond flat out likes acoustic better even when he was playing with the likes of Robbie Robertson and Jimi Hendrix. Kaukonen has a complex about his work with Jefferson Airplane and his electric Hot Tuna playing, that it somehow makes him unworthy of admitting he’s a protégé of The Rev. Gary Davis, now considered by some as the most influential blues picker of the 20th century. And of course, everyone knows the story of how Dylan was pilloried by the folk purists when he went electric. The jump from acoustic to electric has a very charged meaning to older artists who’ve known both worlds.

A simple examination of Kalb’s affiliations before he formed the most important blues-rock band to come out of The City instantly makes it clear that his roots are in acoustic music. By 1965, he’d at least rubbed shoulders with the entire Greenwich Village A list of folk icons. He’d studied with Dave Van Ronk and played with the Rev. Gary Davis and Bob Dylan. He’d appeared on albums with Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, and Sam Charters. His band took its name from a compilation album that included two Kalb contributions, the work of Van Ronk, Spider John Koerner, Eric Von Schmidt and Geoff Muldaur. Kalb had also been in groups with names like True Endeavor Jug Band, Ragtime Jug Stompers, New Strangers and Folk Strangers. Sure, he liked Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but his reference points were much broader and deeper than that.

Kalb today points out that most white guitarists are hypnotized by their instrument and substitute its addictive sound for feeling. “They really are afraid of singing, or they imitate black singers instead of really singing who they are,” he says. “The old country blues guys did it. I sort of do it and don’t do it. Yeah, I come out of the country blues in a lot of ways and when I’m flat picking on the electric guitar, I’m kind of in and out of a lot of worlds. Sometimes I play with my fingers. I’m unorthodox.”

The reason Danny Kalb has not been emulated as much by subsequent blues rockers is as much because most guitarists don’t have his chops as it is because The Blues Project broke up before they could make the kind of impact that the aforementioned Stones, Dead and Butterfield had.

“The legacy of the Blues Project not taken up,” says Kalb, “was to joyfully accept the heritage of the black experience without being afraid of it, without being subservient to it, without being ashamed of yourself and enjoying and partaking of it.

“I see myself as a modern person, a forward thinking musician trying to honor the past.” Then, as if to underline what he’s said, he orders me to “write that in!” Kalb’s new album with Stefan Grossman and Steve Katz, “Player A Little Fiddle,” is a collection of mostly folk standards from the “folk scare” era, but the way Danny plays guitar in places is anything but standard, particularly on the guitar break in “Long Distance Call.”

“I carry on Muddy Waters’ legacy. I hope to do it on that song with the singing and the very strange break in the middle which is like when Charlie Parker took jazz to a necessary different level of abstraction, taking it outside the regular blues framework but articulating the blues feeling of necessarily in a different way so as to make the song live beyond that orthodox blues pedestrian feel.”

Check Danny Kalb out Sunday when he plays with his trio, Bob Jones on bass and Mark Ambrosino on drums. Unorthadox? Yes. Extraordinary? Absolutely!

What: Take Me to the River with The Danny Kalb Trio, Doc Orloff & The Blues Elixir and Deep Blues Storm

When: Sunday, 2 p.m.

Where: Riverfront Park, Troy (rainsite, Fifth United Presbyterian Church, 1915 Fifth St.)

Tickets: Free to the public