Al Kooper article

Rocky Road

From Classic Rock to Progessive to hip hop to today's hot new tunes!

The Zelig of classic rock, Al Kooper keeps playing the blues
- Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Click to ViewClick to View
Al Kooper, the invaluable musician who brought essential flavors to landmark records by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, created Blood, Sweat & Tears and produced classic albums by Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Tubes, has always been a keen judge of talent. Including his own.
Over the years, Kooper has been praised for his creative songwriting, playing and arranging, but his singing has been called merely adequate more than once. He's the first to say his voice was his "weakest card." But he can also rightly say his singing has markedly improved. It's richer on his latest record, last year's "Black Coffee" -- his first solo album in 30 years.
"I learned so many things about singing in that period," says Kooper, on the horn from his home outside Boston, where he moved in the late '90s to teach at the Berklee College of Music. That's where he found the players in the Funky Faculty, the bracing sextet Kooper brings to the Russian River Blues Festival on Saturday. It's the first time he's fronted a band in California in 20 years.
"I know what keys to sing in now," says Kooper, 62, a native New Yorker who began playing guitar on pop records in his early teens, wrote hit songs like "This Diamond Ring" and played the emblematic organ riff on Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." In the past, "whatever key I wrote a song, that's what key I'd sing it in. I was too lazy to transpose. Now I will, if it's the right thing to do."
The Funky Faculty will serve up songs from "Black Coffee" -- a darkish brew of R&B, rock and soul, jazz solos and backwoods blues -- and classic Kooper compositions such as "The Flute Thing," written for the late flutist-bassist Andy Kulberg, who played with Kooper in the innovative Blues Project in the mid-'60s. After that band broke up, Kulberg and Blues Project drummer Roy Blumenfeld settled permanently in the Bay Area. Kulberg died of cancer in 2002.
"I'm excited about playing that in Northern California," Kooper says. "That song became Andy's song. I felt privileged to have written it for him. He was a pretty fantastic person."
He also raves about the guys in this band, with whom he's toured Europe and Japan (he doesn't get much chance to play with his other band, the Rekooperators, which features "the TV people" -- guitarist Jimmy Vivino and bassist Mike Merritt from the Conan O'Brien show band and drummer Anton Fig from David Letterman's show). With the Funky Faculty, "the chemistry is amazing," he says. "Everybody's a great person and a great player. That's rare."
More at link

the rest (Open in New Window)

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

McShane Design

Topic - Al Kooper article - LWR 20:10:00 06/15/06 (5)

Child is father to the man - njjohn 14:44:43 06/16/06 (2)

Re: care to explain that ironic expression for me, please? * - Guy. 06:40:09 06/26/06 (1)

Re: William Wordsworth - LongPlay 09:09:14 07/05/06 (0)

It's a very interesting article... - mkuller 13:55:48 06/16/06 (1)

It was published and posted on June 15th - LWR 18:21:51 06/16/06 (0)

You can not post to an archived thread.