BLUE FLAMES "SOUL SANCTUARY" Liner Notes by Art Tipaldi

It might have been after a late night after hours session in a smoky bar or it might have been on a back porch over a plate of fried chicken and greens. It might have been in the front seat of an old station wagon driving to the grocery store or beside a hospital bed. You’re a kid in the 1960’s. And while most other twenty year olds are holdin’ on to the pop culture fads, you’re sittin’ in with aging blues masters in the storied ghetto bars throughout Watts. At some point, the talk turns serious and a torch is passed. Though others would ignore that moment and let the flame die, you’re cut from a different cloth.

Al Blake, Fred Kaplan, Richard Innes, and Larry Taylor were those kids. Each man spent his teen years watching first generation blues men and women transform the deepest human emotions into music. “Looking back. I feel like I’m a keeper of the flame,” says Al Blake, mastermind behind this band’s cohesiveness and longevity. “We hung out with George “Harmonica” Smith, Walter Horton, T-Bone Walker, James Cotton, Big Joe Turner, Lloyd Glenn, Roy Brown, Eddie “Clean Head” Vinson, Pee Wee Crayton, Percy Mayfield, and so many others. They were willing to share the music so easily with us, because they saw something in us. They certainly saw it in Fats.”

When Blake met an overweight kid from Hollywood with a ponytail, Michael Mann, AKA Hollywood Fats, his world forever changed.

“By the end of the night we met, I knew I’d found this child who held the ultimate secret to life,” remembers Blake. When the Hollywood Fats band formed in 1975, it brought together Fats’ guitar, Kaplan’s piano, Innes’ drums, Blake’s harmonica, and Taylor’s bass to play a fresh vision of the blues.

“Fats was the possibility because he brought us to a level that we just couldn’t reach alone,” says Blake. “There wasn’t anything he couldn’t understand or couldn’t execute. The Fats band tried to bring the traditional music they had been listening to up to the next level.”

The band came apart in 1980 when gigs were harder and harder to come by. In 1986, Blake and Kaplan regrouped the Fats band and performed again in December of 1986. But Fats’ tragic death the next day ended that reprise. Since then, the group has still come together to record. And always with the same spirited result.

Today, they are renamed the Hollywood Blues Flames, a group of men who still embody that spirit and carry the torch. And now, decades later, whenever they play, it’s up to them to pass it along.

The key addition here is Kirk Fletcher, who has been called upon often to fill Fats’ tones. In his short time playing blues guitar, he’s only in his late 20’s, Kirk has taken the time to learn the language first. Every string he touches is played in a very solid traditionally minded approach. (Check out Fletcher’s exciting current release, Shades of Blue, also on Delta Groove.)

Blake feels that Kirk is the most important black blues artist to emerge in the last 50 years. “Kirk is the first musician we’ve found who we have a chemistry with. Something happens with him that approximates what we were up to with Fats. Kirk is willing to give up himself for the music. He knows that the music is bigger than all of us. That’s what the Fats band was all about.”

The Hollywood Blue Flames only needed a way to spread their timeless brand of blues. Enter Randy Chortkoff and Delta Groove Productions. Years ago, Randy watched Fats play with Muddy Waters in the Ash Groove. He also sat through those same late night sessions, and over time, he’s become personal friends with Al Blake and the band. Together they share the same vision for the blues, to get people to feel the truth in real low down, traditional blues.

Don’t think this record is merely a nostalgic Fats’ remembrance. The Hollywood Blue Flames have added a contemporary punch to the blues traditions they know. Though the music here encompasses the deeply rooted, it’s also refreshingly up to date. But, Blake and the band refuse to compromise any musical values or personal principles to reach popular acceptance.

“We’ve always been of the mind that you don’t have to compromise any principles or values,” says Blake. “We’ve always just tried to adhere to the principles. We never tried to be about popularity. We always tried to be about values. We never tried to make the blues an in your face music. I tried to go back and make an album that would appeal to a broad cross section of people without compromising the music.”

Because the music covers all the blues bases and crosses back and forth through so many different styles and influences, Blake feels that this will reach the mainstream. Song after song here is an exhilarating reminder of the timeless appeal of the conversational nature of the blues. Because they know each other so well, these players pass the music around like a basketball at a Globetrotter warm-up. It’s a musical weave where everyone has something intelligent to say.

Whether they jump the blues on “Nit Wit” or Blake low ends Sonny Boy acoustic on “Land of Calieo,” or Kaplan recreates the boogie woogie days of the piano boogie masters of the 1930’s on “Big Foot Boogie,” or Fletcher nails down Chicago 1950 blues guitar on “I’m A Lucky, Lucky Man,” the Hollywood Blue Flames are shinin’ bright.

On Jimmy Rogers’ “You’re Sweet,” included as a bonus, Kim Wilson and Al Blake sit knee to knee and offer a stunning lesson in pre-war acoustic harmonica and guitar blues. The band strikes musical paydirt on the top notch instrumental, “Jo Angelyn,” a minor key blues played with a jazzy delicacy that appeals to anyone.

Listen to the lyrics and the songs tell of personal journeys and burdens, the bluest subjects. “Coco Puffin” takes on how abuses in life consumes people to death. While Blake sings of the personal journey that every true blues player takes on “He’s A Blues Man.”

Each time you listen, that blues torch is passed to your hands where the flame can only get brighter and brighter. Art Tipaldi is a senior writer for Blues Revue and BluesWax. To read more about Al Blake, Fred Kaplan, and Hollywood Fats, read Art’s book, Children of the Blues, which profiles 49 current blues musicians.