Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 16, 1992 TAG: 9201160322
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TRACIE FELLERS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
DRIVEN BY THE BLUES
Bluesman John Hammond probably could tell you more about America's interstate highways than a hard-driving trucker.For 31 years, he's been traveling the beltways and bypasses to get to gigs from Anchorage to Albuquerque. His mode of transportation, until recently, was a van. He's replaced it with a car, and spends more than 200 days a year on the road.
What drives him to do it?
"I guess it's my love of the music," he said in a phone interview from his New York home. "I enjoy playing the songs that I do - I love to play."
Hammond brings his show to Roanoke's Iroquois Club on Friday at 9:30 p.m. Doors open at 9 p.m.; tickets are $10 in advance, $12 the day of the show.
Hammond, 49, is considered one of the best acoustic blues players in the business. He is a master of country blues, the genre cultivated in the Mississippi Delta, and a proficient practitioner of Chicago-style blues. His reputation has taken him to stages in Japan, South America and Europe, and he's played many of the world's most prestigious jazz and blues festivals.
But Hammond also plays plenty of small clubs in smaller cities. "I like it because it's very intimate," he said. "It's much more of a dynamic of sharing with the audience your emotions and feelings. When you're on a big concert stage, you can barely see the audience, and when you're right there, they're into what you're doing.
"It's very demanding. It's also very personal. You get that intense closeness you can't get in a big theater."
Aside from his touring schedule, Hammond also has been busy at work on a new album in the last year. The album, "Got Love If You Want It," is scheduled for release on the Point Blank/Charisma label in April. The album, produced by J.J. Cale, also features the work of blues band Little Charlie and the Nightcaps and "Drifting Blues," a duet with Hammond and John Lee Hooker. Hammond also played on two cuts on Hooker's latest album, "Mr. Lucky," which included an all-star cast of blues musicians.
The way Hammond sees it, it's "the passion and the intensity of the music" that makes the blues an enduring American art form. "Whoever sings it brings his or her own uniqueness to it."
JOHN HAMMOND: 9:30 p.m. Friday, The Iroquois Club, 324 Salem Ave. S.W. Tickets, $10 in advance, $12 the day of the show. 982-8979.