Seeing the Greats
Buddy Guy in Chicago
Short updates:
No US Go Congress for me this year. We were hoping to secure childcare in Portland so I could make it a father-son trip but it fell through.
I’ll talk about a concert at Millennium Park below. Read how Millennium Park got built. Lots of fun facts I didn’t know in there.
Sometime before the pandemic, my wife and I were staying in LA with my sister and her boyfriend Noah, who died in 2022. They always fed us well there, and one night, they took us to Jitlada, the extremely spicy and extremely tasty southern Thai restaurant in a strip mall in Little Armenia.
During our conversations there, Noah made the point that it’s important to see “the Greats” while you can. He had examples from sports, like Messi and LeBron. My wife mentioned that she’d seen Jordan with the Bulls, which is hard to top. He had examples from music. I don’t remember all the names, but David Byrne was in there1.
I don’t think I brought it up then, but this idea goes well with another thing I had thought about the Greats. Whenever someone famous dies, many people give tributes, as they should. But many of the same people hadn’t thought about or appreciated that person enough while they were alive, and people should appreciate them while they’re alive. I know I hadn’t appreciated David Bowie and Prince enough, until they died within a few months in 2016. I was able to, I think, for Aretha Franklin before she died in 2018.
BUT, all of this is about seeing the Greats before they die. I now know that Noah was surely also thinking about seeing the Greats before he died. It’s about living your life to the fullest that you should see the best of humanity.
I get a hard-to-name positive feeling from the knowledge that Noah did later get to see David Byrne’s American Utopia show in New York.
(Head to my sister’s Substack,
, to read more about Noah. In Chicago, you can go to the corner of State and Adams or inside the Shake Shack in River North to see his art.)This was a longwinded way of saying that I felt a moral obligation to see Buddy Guy play the Chicago Blues Festival earlier this month. I felt enough moral obligation about this that we took our 2-year old with us, even though the end time (9 pm) was around his bedtime.
Buddy Guy should probably be a Great by any measure, but he is even more of one in Chicago. He’s one of our last direct connections to Muddy Waters and the Chicago Blues of the mid-20th century, and to the great Chess Records2.
And at age 87, he was playing one of his last Chicago shows. When I thought about someone who’s older, still active as a live musician, and at least as relevant, all I got was Willie Nelson (91).
We arrived at the Pritzker Pavilion just after 6, as the 3rd-to-last act was winding down. It was already hard to find enough lawn space for us. I don’t know if I’ve seen a Blues Festival crowd this big before.
When I went out to get some dumplings at JIAO and came back, there were dozens of people waiting to go through the park’s security, which I didn’t notice at first—I unknowingly joined the head of the line from the side and someone pointed it out to me. Forgive me, readers, as I feigned ignorance and went in. This was actually becoming a logistical nightmare. The lines got longer and longer through the night, and one of our friends gave up because he waited until the start of Buddy Guy’s set to join the line, which was clearly too late in hindsight.
It made me think of
, which talks about how making something free creates congestion, every year on Ben & Jerry’s Free Ice Cream Day. At the same time, I can’t possibly complain about how many great free concerts we get in Chicago.
A lot of what Buddy played was squarely in the Chicago Blues tradition—as in, I’ve heard Muddy Waters recordings of the songs. That was fine with this crowd, who could finish the lyric “I just want to make love to you” for Buddy. This also meant a lot of sexual content, which the 2-year old was too young to understand. Buddy even talked about how “they don’t play this song on the radio anymore”, before playing “She’s Nineteen Years Old”.
The 2-year old did enjoy the music, at one point bringing out a shaker and shaking it to the beat, prompting a “He came ready” from a woman behind us. And most importantly, Buddy’s guitar playing was still the distinctive and frenetic blend of blues and rock. This was what we came for.
Check out Buddy Guy’s tour dates here.
What I’m listening to now
Here’s another great album from May.
We got to see Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper live at the Old Town School of Folk Music (of course) this March.
According to me, Ballaké Sissoko is a Great. With Toumani Diabaté, he is one of the 2 great living masters of the kora, the West African harp. They both come from long lineages of griots, who are the musicians/historians/storytellers in traditional West African society. They draw on that huge tradition but also create entirely new music, especially through collaborations. While Toumani thrives on fast, scintillating solos, Ballaké is more of a minimalist. They are both must-sees for me when they are playing in town.
I didn’t know about Derek Gripper until the show got announced, but his story is interesting. He was a young white guitarist in South Africa, when he first heard the kora on the radio. He wanted to play the music, but initially he didn’t know how, so he started playing music he knew in a kora “accent”. He demonstrated this on stage by first playing a Bach piece straight up, then with kora-like phrasing. He explained that this is like how someone who goes to Paris and doesn’t know French might start trying to learn by first speaking English in a French accent—let me know if you do this, by the way. Eventually he must have figured out how, because he has an album of kora music on guitar.
Like the Chick Corea-Béla Fleck collaboration that I talked about last time, the interplay between the 2 musicians is uncanny. You also get some segments that seem to be trance-inducing, or “boring” if you’re not into that.
has been writing about ancient musical traditions around the world and how epics are told in trance-inducing repetitive melodies. Seeing Ballaké in concert made me realize that griots are of course part of this story.David Byrne also should’ve been in my last footnote to my last post (candidates for the best concert I’ve been to).
I love the Chicago-ness of how Chess Records was founded by 2 Polish immigrant brothers, originally named Czyż.
i'm glad i saw federer, wish i had seen sampras. and wish i had seen whitney before she lost parts of her range.