Print
While blues music’s most illustrious baby, rock ‘n’ roll, has consistently attracted the attention of most performers, Curtis Salgado has resolutely walked the path less trod. The redeemer of blues largely forgotten offspring, soul and R&B, Salgado is the second coming of the golden era in the 1960s and 1970s when labels like Stax and Hi flourished and vocal wonders like Al Green and Otis Redding were household names that ruled the airwaves.
“My music is a hybrid of all the stuff that I admire,” relates the fifty-six-year-old, Portland Oregon-based singer. “I just play what’s in my head and I try to piece the song together and for whatever reason, it usually comes out as hard-ass rhythm and blues.”
Salgado’s core concept is simple. “Soul is about heart and about belief,” he says tersely. Refusing to waste his interpretive gifts and gutsy vocal chops on the safe, the gimmicky and the musically mundane, he lets his unerring ear for sincerity ferret out the obscure gems in the repertoire that make his material sparkle. “I don’t care who writes the songs, as long as I can make them my own,” insists Salgado who doesn’t just sing a tune, he inhabits it; wrapping his limber vocal cords around a heartfelt lyric like no one else can.
There was never a shortage of sonic stimulation in the Salgado home in Eugene, Oregon. “I grew up around music, and I grew up around black music. Cause my parents were hip! It moved me. It tickled my auditory nerve!” he exclaims recalling the excitement that vinyl mentors like Ray Charles, Count Basie and Little Walter Jacobs stirred in him. A harmonica from his mother and vocal and dance lessons financed with his college education fund, Salgado was a potent mix of raw talent, showman and scholar by the time he started playing in bands at eighteen.
The singer and harmonica player for six years in the fledgling Robert Cray Band, Salgado nick named Albert Collins “The Master of the Telecaster.” In 1977, he struck up a friendship with comedian John Belushi who used Salgado as the prototype for his character Jake in the Blues Brothers skits and movies. (The Blues Brothers’ album Briefcase Full of Blues is dedicated to Salgado.) He fronted the legendary Roomful of Blues from 1984 to 1986 before kicking off his own recording career with The Stilettos pausing only to tour with Santana in 1995.
Four outstanding releases on the Shanachie imprint are finally generating some momentum in the career of this woefully under appreciated singer and harmonica player. His latest tour-de-force, Clean Getaway, received nominations for Album of the Year, Soul Blues Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Soul Blues Male Artist of the Year at the 30th annual Blues Music Awards in 2009. Recorded less than two years after undergoing a successful transplant for liver cancer the album is a celebration of Salgado’s unstoppable fighting spirit.
A riveting, knockout vocalist and a transcendent musical experience, Curtis Salgado is “rock ‘n’ soul” to the max. www.curtissalgado.com
Ken Wright
