From Blues Fan To Film Maker

What kind of person independently produces a major blues tribute concert and awards show every year for a decade, without ever breaking even? Or finances and produces numerous recording sessions featuring some of the world’s top blues talent, without even having a label lined up to release the results? Or who starts his own blues record label at a time when most other established labels are struggling to stay afloat?

Only someone who is truly, deeply committed to the blues.

Randy Chortkoff has been behind all of these endeavors and countless others during the last two decades ---- But his love of the uniquely American art form called the blues goes back twice as far. Son of a hard-core jazz fan, Chortkoff was listening to Louis Armstrong – not on records, but live and in person – before he was out of grammar school in the 1950s. The music of the jazz and swing greats of the day was part of the daily musical diet in the Chortkoff household in Los Angeles and although he may not have realized it at the time young Randy’s course in life was already being set. By the time he reached his teens in the mid ‘60s he was already primed for the first ‘blues revival,’ and before long, under the spell of bluesmen like Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins. He was a regular at the fabled Ash Grove which was the LA stop for legendary blues figures like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

In the late ‘60s Chortkoff migrated north to San Francisco where he quickly became a regular at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. There he saw Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, BB and Albert King and many other blues acts thanks to the adventurous booking policies pioneered by rock promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helms.

However Chortkoff fell victim to the excesses of the era and fought his way through substance abuse and related legal problems. With all of the curveballs, trials and tribulations that life has thrown at him, the one constant touchstone he always came back to has been the music. Through all of his troubles, he continued to learn about the blues and the people who made it, and made his first tentative steps into blues booking and promotion.

By the end of the ‘70s Chortkoff had found a direction and was living clean and sober. It was around this time that he met a bluesman who would become something of a mentor and guide into a deeper level of blues appreciation: harp player/singer Rod Piazza. He, like Chortkoff, had immersed himself in the blues in the mid-‘60s, and had decided early on that his calling was as a musician. As such, he helped to open up a whole world of the blues for Randy, introducing him to all the musicians on the scene, making him tapes of hard-to-find recordings by many of the great blues legends, and giving him some direction on the harp. Piazza also helped him to gain a better understanding of the genius of one the blues’ greatest instrumentalists - Chicago blues harp legend Little Walter Jacobs.

Chortkoff’s enthusiasm for Little Walter’s music eventually led him on a quest to see and hear as many of the musicians as he could who had played with or were influenced by the late harp master. A major challenge was that many of those musicians were in Chicago and Randy was in Los Angeles. Establishing a pattern that he’d go on to repeat throughout his career, where Chortkoff saw a challenge, he also recognized an opportunity. Rather than traveling to Chicago to hear the blues he loved, why not bring the blues he loved to LA? Putting up the money he earned at his day job in sales, he began occasionally bringing in bluesmen and promoting live shows featuring some of the traditional blues musicians who otherwise were not venturing to the west coast – or in some cases, even beyond their own neighborhoods. Once he’d gotten his feet wet booking and realized he had a bit of a salesman’s knack for it, things ever-so-gradually began to snowball. These shows were motivated strictly by his own passion for their music.

Out of these projects came one of his proudest achievements: the annual Blues Hall Of Fame / Little Walter Tribute concert events that began in 1987.

“One of the early Chicago guitar greats, Luther Tucker was staying at my house and doin’ some shows. Since we all loved Little Walter, I thought, why not do a big show for my birthday? Tucker gave me all these phone numbers. I started calling people like Jimmy Rogers, and Dave and Louis Myers from Little Walter’s band The Aces. Another friend had found Billy Boy Arnold in Chicago. I was always a big fan of Billy Boy’s Vee Jay material. So I invited Billy Boy out too. Willie Dixon had moved from Chicago to LA so I asked him as well. And some other great people who happened to be in the area just decided to show up on their own, like Lowell Fulson and James Cotton and his band. We did the show at this huge venue in Hollywood. The band had Tucker, Louis Myers, and Jimmy Rogers on guitars, Willie Dixon and Dave Myers on bass, Rod Piazza on harmonica, Honey Piazza on piano, and Al Duncan from Chess Records on drums. We had three rooms going at once. William Clarke and Lester Butler were on the show, Mitch Kashmar, Junior Watson…it was a harp player’s dream. From then on, I did it annually.

“Through the years I had every Chicago harp player you could possibly think of: Jr. Wells, Carey Bell, James Cotton, Mack Simmons, Big Wheeler, Snooky Pryor, Rafael Neal, Lester Davenport as well as Frank Frost, Kim Wilson, Mark Hummell, Al Blake... the list just goes on and on.”

During these events Chortkoff also ceremoniously honored many of these blues greats by awarding them plaques acknowledging their contributions to the history of the blues. In many cases these were the first and only time these artists received such recognition.

Buoyed by the enthusiastic reception of these events he began producing more shows in LA with other out of town acts including Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Paul Butterfield and Albert King’s penultimate performance. During a California trip Chortkoff had booked for Billy Boy Arnold, Randy decided that it had been far too long since Arnold had been properly recorded with a good, sympathetic band. So even though he’d never produced a record and didn’t have contact with any label that might be interested releasing it he assembled a crew of LA’s best traditional blues players and booked the studio time to record an album with Billy Boy. Those recordings became Arnold’s highly acclaimed 1993 comeback release on Alligator Records, “Back Where I Belong.” Encouraged by this success, he independently produced projects by west coast-based bluesmen Finis Tasby and King Ernest both which were eventually released by Evidence Music.
The blues was not paying Chortkoff’s bills however, like many of those who work to keep the music alive, it was a passionate yet part-time effort, with the expenditures more often than not outweighing the income. By the late 1990s, the experience he’d gained dealing with the business of blues and bookings had helped to pave the way to a career in the Hollywood film industry as an executive producer and music supervisor on a number of independent feature films. The considerable success of his day job is now allowing him to invest more capital back into the blues-related endeavors that are his first love. To that end he’s finally realized the blues fanatic’s ultimate dream: he’s started his own record label, Delta Groove, so that he can produce those projects that move him, without having to worry about finding a label to release them as he had in the past. He’s also got his eye on the goal of utilizing one of his businesses as a way of promoting the other – yet another example of encountering a challenge and seeing an opportunity. That is, he wants to place blues music in films.

“The average person has a preconceived idea of what the blues is. People who haven’t experienced authentic blues music think that it’s some sort of one-dimensional thing -- that it’s depressing, crying in your beer music that sings about ‘I lost my baby.’ My dream is to make motion pictures and include authentic roots music. Music that puts a smile on people’s faces, touches their soul and exposes them to this music by going through the back door and hearing it in a context they’re not expecting. That would be the ultimate, to make a movie and create something like the ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ phenomenon. That film introduced millions of people to bluegrass music. That’s a genre of music that most people would never ordinarily be exposed to. They heard the music without being told they were gonna hear hillbilly music. But the music made the public feel a certain way and then they went out and bought it and created income for those musicians that they would never have seen otherwise.”

Whichever direction things go and whatever new projects Chortkoff undertakes the blues will never be far away. It’s been said that you don’t choose the blues, the blues chooses you. Chortkoff has his own philosophy on this subject, a concept that Rod Piazza hipped him to.

“Everyone’s heard the expression ‘the chosen few.’ Well I think there’s also ‘the chosen who.’ ‘The chosen who’ are the people who heard the music and it touched them, for whatever reason, deep in their soul. Touched them in a way that’s hard to put into words....”

There’s no question that when it comes to blues, Randy Chortkoff is definitely one of “the chosen who.”