Blues Fans Take Note

I’m overdue to do this plug, and just under the wire at that, but I do want to make you aware of this great radio show my old high school buddy Matt Mania hosts every Tuesday afternoon.

No word of a lie, Matt is the guy who introduced me to theatre, directed the first movies I was ever in, and generally raised my level of sophistication as a teenager by several notches. Prior to that, I would describe myself as a very well-read 12 year old country bumpkin who watched six hours of television a day and liked to put on Halloween costumes a little too much. Anyway, among our thousand shared enthusiasms was American roots music of various types. I mean, in a serious way. He’s actually in the movie business (has worked on many major films and TV series over the decades), but his side project is this show on the local college radio station which he now calls The Trip.

The blues are Matt’s specialty and much to his credit, he’s enthusiastic about the many forms it takes. Most people reduce it in their heads to some very narrow idea, which would ordinarily be some vague concept of Chicago electric blues, I assume, or the boogie woogie jump blues and R & B of the ’40s, or the sounds of the ’80s revival when it nearly became the late 20th century muzak, used in tv commercials and the like. But there are so many other variations: the elemental early acoustic Delta blues that fed Chicago; the finger-picked Piedmont type which seems closer to Appalachian folk, bluegrass, and ragtime; the so-called classic blues of the ’20s and ’30s, which was more associated with female vocalists and piano backing than guitar; and more formalized and orchestrated styles which draw from the structure of the blues for the purposes of ragtime, tin pan alley, jazz, swing, country, and rock and roll. Matt’s on top of all of that stuff and he’s eclectic in his curating. He doesn’t want to be bored by repetition any more than you do. He astounded me on my recent visit by PLAYING blues and ragtime on the piano in his living room. This is a skill he manifestly did not possess when we were last hanging together on the regular many years ago.

Matt doesn’t perform on his show, though — just respectfully and reverently plays tracks, and chimes in about them from time to time. He’s a man of few words both on the mic and off, which is no doubt one of the attractions of the blues for him. Recall that James Brown once bent the blues form into a tune that had but a single word in its lyric: “Please”.

Matt’s show The Trip plays Tuesdays 3-6pm on WURI (90.3), Rhode Island, but in the almost certain event that you are not IN Rhode Island, the WURI website, where the show is streamed live and archived is wuri.org.