JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: Toledo Blade Date: 07/2008 Writer: Rod Lockwood

This is how bad Jason Ricci was as a teenage musician:

He was on the verge of getting kicked out of a punk band because he wasn't very good and couldn't sing well "even for punk standards." This wasn't late '80s/early '90s New York, where even the punk bands were good. This was Portland, Maine.

He couldn't play guitar either, so the band decided what he'd play, unknowingly jump-starting a now-flourishing career.

"I was getting benched at the shows so I needed an instrument. The band kind of picked harmonica for me."

Now at age 34, he's considered one of the hottest blues harp players in the world, a riveting live performer (and good singer, too) whose music with his band New Blood is an exciting hybrid of blues, jam band excursions, jazz, and rock. Ricci, who will be in Toledo tomorrow at the Blue Devil, also breaks every blues stereotype imaginable, which is reflected in his complete disregard for musical boundaries.

He's gay. His hair is often pink or some other color. He's a passionate skateboarder. He says exactly what he thinks in interviews and goes out of his way to say he'll never sing in blues vernacular because it wouldn't be real. After all, whoever heard of a self-described "suburban white boy" singing as if he just walked out of a 1930s-era Mississippi cotton field?

And if that rubs purists the wrong way, he's not worried about it. Ricci toured with blues legends R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, among others, and he said he learned an important lesson living among those artists and playing with them.

"The way to be accepted by those people is not trying to be one of them," he said in a telephone interview from Ottawa, Ont., where he was preparing to play with guitarist Walter Trout. "It's to be a queer white boy from Maine; that's the quickest way to gain access to their hearts."

Ricci said he's received some backlash in the blues community for his high-energy, outside-the-blues-box approach to music and his lifestyle, which is one reason he'd like to explore getting on a few more bills that feature jam bands.

"I find that audience very eligible for what we do and it seems like I would deal with less criticism about my sexuality - because I'm gay - less criticism about my hair, about my clothes, about how many notes I play in any given solo.

"There's a lot of elitism in the blues world and there's also a lot of redneckism in it, too. And it hasn't been easy dedicating myself to a blues audience [when] a small portion of the audience doesn't want me to have anything to do with it."

That said, he also makes it clear that he loves being lumped in with the blues as a musical style, and with the exception of a few critics who can't get past his modernistic approach, he's comfortable with his audience even if he'd like to see it expand.

"I want to accept the opportunity for growth without hating where I am. I know players that do and that hate the blues world and don't like it here," Ricci said. "I love the blues world. I love the fact that my fans can come up and talk to me. I love the fact that it's a very personable thing and that the musicians can all talk to each other and we're all friends."

Ricci's mastery of the harmonica is the result of intense dues-paying and obsessive hard work. Once his punk band kicked him over to the harp, he studied it constantly, practicing between four and eight hours a day. His mother helped him out by taking him to shows anytime a blues band that featured a great harmonica player came to Maine.

At a young age he was touring with working bands, but his career suffered a serious setback - and paradoxically, a major leap forward - when years of drug abuse turned into a serious addiction to crack cocaine. In 1998 he was arrested for drug abuse and ordered to serve a year in prison.

After six months, Ricci was sent to a drug rehab halfway house and he'd stay up all night listening to a jazz radio station, expanding his musical tastes, which was both exciting and depressing because hearing greats like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis demonstrated the harmonica's limitations.

"I became frustrated because the instrument I had chosen and wasted my life on was not capable of producing the 12 tones needed to play that music."

Then someone turned him onto Howard Levy of the groundbreaking jazz fusion band Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, who was expanding the harmonica's range by using different kinds of harps. Ricci dived into studying his music and the fact that he wasn't allowed to play in bars for a couple of years as part of his probation led to a long period of wood shedding, where he'd once again practice alone for four to eight hours a day.

The result: he emerged with a new style that is truly innovative. Now he's sober, he's on a record label that promotes his music, he has a management team that makes sure he plays higher-end blues clubs like the Blue Devil instead of sports bars, and his band is sympathetic to his passion for everything from Little Walter to Sun Ra.

Which is why you won't hear Ricci complaining.

"I'm very grateful to be here and that's all there is to it," he said.

Jason Ricci and New Blood perform at 9 p.m. tomorrow in the Blue Devil, 938 West Laskey Rd. Tickets are $8 at the door. Information: 419-720-4320.

Contact Rod Lockwood at: rlockwood@theblade.com
or 419-724-6159