Argentine band transforms the blues into world music
By Courtney Haden
That music is a universal language might be proven by how fluently people communicate with it, none more persuasively than four visitors from Argentina whose band’s name reflects their shared passion: Mo’Blues.
Think for a moment about the thing you love best to do in this world. Now consider whether you would leave your home and travel 5,000 miles to another hemisphere to do it. That’s what the talented quartet Mo’Blues did last week, stopping off in Birmingham en route to becoming the first South American band ever to compete in the colossal International Blues Challenge, held annually in Memphis, Tenn.
Santa Fe, Argentina, is a city roughly the size of Birmingham, but it does not resemble the sort of place one might imagine to be a hotbed of I-IV-V progressions. “It shows how powerful the blues is,” bassist Sebastian Casis grins. “Maybe you are surprised that it kind of bounces to you, because America shared the blues with the rest of the world and now it’s bouncing back.“
Thanks to Susan Collier and the Magic City Blues Society, Mo’Blues has been bouncing into Birmingham regularly since 2000, winning more fans with each stopover not just because of their strop-razor-tight musicality, but their effervescent personalities. As they discuss the nuances of their chosen music, they are not troubled by provincial American notions of authenticity and entitlement. They know they have found a new way of telling some old stories and they couldn’t be happier to have you hear it.
Although Argentina is a bracingly cosmopolitan nation, its native culture blended with many world influences, urban blues music was heady stuff for boys who had grown up under one repressive government or another. “We saw the contemporary world through TV, and we saw a new expression of young people living a kind of freedom, you know?” says keyboard whiz Gabriel de Pedro. “In our city and in our situation, I believe music was the food of our souls.”
For guitarist Federico Teiler, that meant exotic phonograph records: “I bought the first Elvis Presley record, then the Beatles, then Stevie Ray Vaughn.” Drummer Ruben Tissenbaum concurs with the choice of SRV, saying, “It is the blues for me. I heard Led Zeppelin and these others that were related to the blues, but the first time I heard Stevie Ray Vaughn, I heard the classic Texas blues.”
Listening to the modern blues-rockers drew Mo’Blues into the timeless vortex of music. “For instance,” Casis noted, “I got my first Led Zeppelin record when I was 19. It was like a miracle. Then I read about Jimmy Page playing with the Yardbirds and what music [they] played. The time line was going back. I found out about Willie Dixon… I began to understand the lyrics. I think all of us learned to speak English from these records. I learned how to say, ‘Doncha?’ and ‘Doncha wanna?’”
The first time Mo’Blues played together, according to Ruben, they put together a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughn at the Hard Rock Cafe in Buenos Aires: “We played twenty songs from him; it was incredible.” The band began playing regularly in clubs all over Argentina, then hit the American festival circuit on the do-it-yourself plan in 1999, playing Bluestock in Memphis and the Down Home Blues fest in Camden, SC. Considered a mere novelty at first, the players’ tightly interlocked instrumentation gave notice they were no dilettantes. “We are not a soloist with a backup band,” Casis says. “We work as a team. We play all together in the same moment and try to be the other.”
The 2008 Blues Challenge seemed the perfect spot to stage a sort of coming-out party for the band, since, as Susan Collier put it, “Everybody in blues will be in Memphis.” Mindful of many complications to simplify, Collier and the band started working on the logistics of the trip during its 2006 Birmingham visit.
Up against 160 other bands from around the world, Mo’Blues had a great rookie outing. Playing at Alfred’s, they finished second by only a few points, missing the contest finals, but earning a slot at a battle of the bands held at the New Daisy Theater on Beale Street, where the group finished in the top four and pocketed $500.
Susan’s Monday e-mail summed up: “The trip overall was a huge success, as they couldn’t walk down the street without people coming up to them for autographs and saying how much they loved them. The success was the promoters, record labels and the big wigs in the blues world being in awe.”
That awe translated into a new alliance with a high-profile PR rep as well as an offer of several festival gigs in France — on the promoter’s tab, for a change. It was more validation of the band’s wide appeal, but you needn’t take the Memphians’ word for it. After all, Mo’Blues will be performing this Saturday night in Birmingham, starting around midnight at Marty’s, which would be a great blues room in anyone’s town.
Why should you make the effort to see a band breakin’ the blues en Espanol? Because of that universal language thing we mentioned earlier. As Susan Collier explained, “To hear them do ‘There’s a red house over yonder’, very familiar lyrics to anyone who loves the blues, in Spanish, and to sit back in the crowd and watch; me personally, I see a crowd singing in English, I see a band singing in Spanish and all of a sudden I see the crowd going, ‘Casa rojo’. I’ve never seen a blues act do what they are doing. That’s why I believe in them so much.”
Mo’Blues believes in us as well. Federico Teiler chose his words well as he sought to define the band’s deep regard for Birmingham: “We are taking so seriously the thing to be here. We are thinking so strongly to be here more. Here we found a place that we can call home.”
Mo’Blues will perform this Saturday night at Marty’s. Show details are online at www.martysbar.com.
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