JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: Denver Post Date: 12/2007 Writer: Kurt Brighton

Music Q&A: Jason Ricci
by John Wenzel on December 20, 2007
Harmonica player Jason Ricci enjoys confounding expectations.

– Blues harmonica virtuoso/singer Jason Ricci and his band New Blood play a lot of shows annually, and by a lot we mean a lot. Last year they played nearly 320, and this year they’re on track to hit 250. Ricci is also an uncommon performer in other ways: His band’s genre-blending approach tackles jazz, Eastern music and jam band territory as much as traditional blues, and Ricci is one of the only (if not The Only) openly-gay frontman in blues.

– We talked to 33-year-old Ricci yesterday as he hurtled through Utah on his way to a string of Front Range shows (tonight at the Boulder Outlook Hotel and tomorrow night at Oskar Blues in Lyons) about his pilgrimage to meet and play with blues greats, the discrimination he’s experienced on the road and the importance of Blues Hammer…

So where are you at the moment?

We’re in the middle of the mountains in Utah, free and on the pavement after being snowed in for a bit.

Are you headed toward Colorado?

Yeah, we have a show in Colorado tonight so we’re trying to make it in time.

You’re based in Nashville now, but I understand you made a pilgrimage to the South when you first started out, playing with greats like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough?

I just went down to Memphis because I’d heard of this harmonica player there named Pat Ramsey. R.L. and Junior’s kids found me on the street and hired me to play with them.

That’s pretty cool that they sought you out.

Yeah, they heard me playing and just asked me if I was interested doing some shows with them, and eventually I moved in with David Kimbrough, Junior’s son.

Maybe the answer to this is obvious, but what’s the value of making a sort of mythical blues pilgrimage like that?

The reward from that is knowledge that can’t be conveyed from any piece of vinyl or audio device.

What did you learn?

The most important thing I learned is that I’m not black, I’m never going to be, and that this music is not part of my culture historically. So I learned a lot about what I’m not.

Do you think just because you’re not the same race or ethnicity as some culture’s music that you can’t play it with authenticity?

Anybody can play anything authentically, but it’s not part of our culture, and a lot of white people, in an attempt to play black music authentically, start to sort of dress and behave like that music is part of them, which is really just a big costume party. It’s very insincere and there a lot of bands that do it.

I read somewhere that you said it was like, “Halloween’s over, take off the costumes.”

It’s kind of weird — I love a lot of those bands musically, almost all of them. I can appreciate anything for what it’s worth but when you start comparing yourself with somebody like Junior Kimbrough at his own game… f**kin’ come on, man.

Your press materials present you as a rebel, but you have to understand the rules of anything before you can break them, right?

Absolutely. I mean, I spent eight years listening to nobody but Little Walter, and a lot of guys go astray from that. Have you ever seen that movie “Ghost World”?

Yep, I know what you’re going to say — that terrible band Blues Hammer. My girlfriend and I use that as shorthand for any crappy wannabe blues band that we run across.

Yes, f**kin’ Blues Hammer! That’s awesome that you know that. That’s an example of the guys that didn’t take the time. But we’re not intentionally trying to break the rules, per se, we’re just playing whatever comes natural. We know how to color in the lines. My bass player, for example, was with Nappy Brown for years, my guitar player has been with me since we were a straight-ahead blues band. He can play nothing but T-Bone Walker licks all night if he wanted to — and not run out of T-Bone licks. That’s very important to me when I hire a guy, and it’s one of the reasons I keep guys for so long. It’s not easy for me to find a guy who can play it just the way it was recorded in 1950, which is prerequisite, and then be able to piss all over that a minute later and go all Blues Hammer on them…

It’s interesting to me that the jam band community has embraced you too, since your sound is more blues than anything else.

We have our fair share of taper-followers. There are 40-some-odd shows at archive.org. One of them from 2003 has been downloaded so many times I can’t even count. There was a period of a few weeks where we beat every other band on archive.org with downloads of that show. I’m like, “Check out some of the f**kin’ new shows, guys!”

Is your live set pretty heavy on songs from your recent album, “Rocket Number 9″?

It’s different every night, really. It depends on what songs we want to play that night, the set makeup, and how incompetent the guy running sound is. Some nights there are lots of things I can’t do, song-wise, because I might actually need to be able to hear the other guys singing or a guitar part or whatever.

Is it true that you’ve also experience discrimination on the tour circuit due to being openly gay?

You run into all the time. It’s just a comment here, a comment there. Sometimes it’s a gig, sometimes it’s a festival, or something bigger. And for every time that we see it, God knows how many times we haven’t. But yeah, it’s a f**kin’ serious issue and it’s terrible that it takes place. It’s a rotten thing to hear after you’re sick as a dog, or you’ve driven 11 hours to get to a show in some town. You’re up there playing your heart out, playing two hour sets even though you’re contracted for shorter than that. You get done and you’re bleeding from rolling around on the ground, and some drunk fell over and crushed your pedals on your monitor, and you hear some snide f**kin’ comment from somebody in the audience or backstage.

How do people know? Is it because you wear a ring with a pride flag on it?

They get that impression because I’m too cute to be straight.

Heh… I really can’t think of any other openly gay blues frontmen.

There are lots of rumors about certain famous ones out there.

Is there something about the blues genre over, say, dance pop that makes performers feel less comfortable about being open with their sexuality?

It’s a very masculine genre of music. For a long time the reason guys played harmonica, or so I’ve been told, is that it was considered very feminine to be only a vocalist, and that you had to play an instrument as well.

That’s crazy. I hear you also play an insane amount of shows, like 300 per year?

We’re going to be real close this year. We’re over 250 right now, which is less than last year.

Why is that?

I don’t know. It might be partially because we took a couple weeks off to record our album. The 319 shows that we did last year — those were actual dates, and that’s not even counting days off.

Do you like playing bigger cities or smaller cities?

Actually, we like playing big cities the least. They’re the worst to play. You don’t get treated as well, and you certainly don’t get paid as well. The accommodations are much more expensive. Of course we do better there, our numbers are better. We’re just that kind of band that gets a big city buzz really quickly and takes longer to catch on in smaller towns. The big cities are certainly a little more open-minded as far as everything about the band.

Are you looking forward to playing Colorado?

Oh yeah, we’ve palyed a bunch of shows there, maybe like 40 to 50.

Could that be because we’re so friendly to jam bands?

It’s because Colorado has a great live music culture, period.