“It’s important to preserve and spread the blues publicly because there are a lot of people who don’t know what an inspiration and balm it can be in your life – because they haven’t been exposed. There are other people who don’t know they can write, sing and, play blues to keep themselves sane and to cope with a crazy world - because they haven’t heard it. So we have to get it out there.”

Al Basile: Blues In Hand (in Soul & Mind)

Eight-time Blues Music Award-nominated singer/songwriter/cornetist Al Basile will be released his latest album Blues In Hand on October 9th, Al’s 21st release on Sweetspot since 1998. After 2023’s career retrospective B’s Time, Al is back with all new songs and a new production team. Using his Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues veteran players and recorded by Jack Gauthier in the familiar surroundings of Westlake Recording studio in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, Al had combined Jack’s great tracking with the most up-to-date technology by mixer and mastering engineerGlenn Halverson at his Sonic Hill Studio outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The results are a new sound for Al’s classic blues-roots songs. Al's last release, 2023's B's Time, was his critically acclaimed career retrospective that featured 17 songs from Basile’s solo albums, remastered using the most up-to-date technology. Al Basile’s previous album releases have consistently made the top 20 on the Living Bluescharts. His songs have been covered by Ruth Brown, Johnny Rawls, and the Knickerbocker All Stars. Guests on his own releases have included the Blind Boys of Alabama, Sista Monica Parker, Sugar Ray Norcia, Jerry Portnoy, and jazz great Scott Hamilton.                                            (Al Basile / Photo by Meghan Sepe)

Celebrated for his mastery of lyric writing as well as music, Al's skill with words extends to his other career as a poet: he is published regularly in leading journals, has won prizes, and has four books in print collecting his work from the Seventies until the present day. For the last years he has taught lyric writing, led panels, and performed at poetry conferences. In recent years Al has begun writing and producing audio plays in verse; two recent plays have won Gold Awards at the HEARnow audio theater festival.

Interview by Michael Limnios                Archive: Al Basile, 2020 & 2022 interview

Special Thanks: Al Basile & Mark Pucci Media

Do you have any interesting stories about the making of the new album “Blues In Hand”? 

On the music side, a couple of things stand out to me: first, I didn’t record an album last year, and the year before that I made B’s Time, which was a career retrospective covering the 25 years of my label Sweetspot. But I keep writing songs all the time, so for this one I had 25 songs to pick from, where I usually record the 13 songs I’ve written in that year. That means I chose the best out of a larger group, and picked ones I thought would work best together; second, Kid Andersen has played stellar guitar on my last few albums, and I figured if I was going to be soloing along with him on most of the songs, I’d better make my solos longer, to keep up! That’s resulted in a record that shows off my playing more than usual – and since Covid I’ve been practicing more, so my playing has improved.

On the production side, this is the first of my records where I was fully engaged producing the sound of the outcome. I worked very closely with Jack Gauthier, who has tracked my albums for decades, and new production partner and engineer Glenn Halverson, who owns a studio in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Glenn and I worked for weeks on the mixing and mastering to get every detail of the sound exactly the way I wanted. All the decisions were mine. I’m especially proud of the sound we got for my cornet – it’s the closest to my live tone in the room I’ve ever heard. I’m responsible for this album on all the levels – writing, singing, playing, recording, mixing, and mastering. I think it’s the best sounding album I’ve made, out of 21. If there’s anything you don’t like, blame me!

Your work is known for creatively reimagining blues tradition. How do you balance respect for the roots with experimentation?

For me every new song is an experiment, and every solo is one too. So I focus on bringing new ideas in at that level. The musical styles I work in are historically familiar; when I teach the songs to the players, I give them examples of the feel and sound I want by playing brief snippets of classic blues and R&B. Then I give them room to interpret that sound, rather than copy it. I write the bass lines and ask Brad Hallen to play exactly what I wrote behind the vocals (I write the bass lines and the horn parts to set up my vocal phrasing, so they have to be where I need them), but give him room to vary things elsewhere. Same with Kid – on “You Ain’t That Fine” I gave him a classic muted riff from Buddy Guy on West Side Soul, and asked him to use that throughout, but vary as he chose. I work with people who are creative, but who know me and my music very well, so they strike the balance between tradition and innovation as well as I do – I just map out where it can happen.                              (Al Basile / Photo by Addie Ray)

“In Roomful in the seventies, were playing classic blues, swing, and R&B from the thirties to the fifties. Aside from the bands we influenced – and there were a few – no one else was playing the repertoire in those days. When we worked with older jazz, blues, and R&B guys like Cleanhead Vinson and Red Prysock, they were surprised that we had the feeling right. But that was music we loved, so we learned it.”

What keeps a musician passionate after five decades in blues/jazz? How do you prepare for your recordings and performances to help you maintain both spiritual and musical stamina?

As a brass player and singer, I practice every day without fail, to keep sharp. I’m on a big cycle yearly, where I write the songs in the spring, make demos, work on vocals through the summer, arrange and write horn parts in the fall, and go into the studio to record in January. I’ve done that for twenty years, basically, with last year being the exception as I said. I’m a creature of habit, and I take my cue from Nature – which doesn’t get tired. So neither do I.

Why is it important to we preserve and spread the blues? What is the role of Blues music in today’s society?

It’s important to preserve and spread the blues publicly because there are a lot of people who don’t know what an inspiration and balm it can be in your life – because they haven’t been exposed. There are other people who don’t know they can write, sing and, play blues to keep themselves sane and to cope with a crazy world - because they haven’t heard it. So we have to get it out there.

But privately, the emotions that fuel blues are in all of us, so there will always be people who find their way to the blues because it frees those emotions in a healthy way. Blues isn’t going anywhere; it’s in us. But we still want to get the word out to those who don’t know it.

What moment changed your music life the most? With such an illustrious career, what has given you the most satisfaction?              (Al Basile / Photo by Laura Carbone)

Those are two questions, and they have two answers. First, the moment that changed my musical life the most happened around 1976 when I asked jazz pianist Gerry Wiggins if I could sit in with his trio at Sandy’s Jazz Revival in Beverly, Mass. – a club I had played in many times with Roomful of Blues. I was just making progress learning how to play standards, after soloing on blues changes for years in Roomful. I had some tunes I knew pretty well, and I named one to Wiggins, gave him a key and a tempo, and he said “Okay, we’ll call you up next set.” The place was packed, so when he called me up I had to stand close to the edge of the stage, with a couple of hundred people looking up at me with my cornet. I turned around to count off the tune, and Wiggins counted twice as fast, and the band went off on a tune I’d never heard before. I didn’t know the changes, or even the key. But I was there, so I had to play. I turned back to the crowd and played – or tried to – a chorus or two, and it was awful. I sounded like I couldn’t play at all. While the other guys were soloing, the crowd looked at me like I had two heads. After what seemed like an hour, the tune ended, and Wiggins leaned over at the piano and said, “Okay, now we’ll play your tune.” And they did – just what I’d asked for. I played much better, of course, and the crowd gave ne a nice hand, probably figuring I’d had an attack of temporary insanity. But driving home that night, I vowed I would never have that feeling of being exposed on the bandstand again. The only way to be sure of that was either to quit playing, or to work on my ear enough that I could solo on any song I heard, even for the first time. I’ve been working on my ear since 1976, and I’m starting to get where I want to be. So that was a turning point in my musical life. Wiggins taught me an old school lesson, and I’m grateful – because it made me work. And I needed to work.

The most satisfying moment in my musical career happened when I played a local television show in my hometown, Haverhill, Mass. In 2007 – because I got to play with the man who taught me to play the trumpet in 1956, Edolo Lupi. I didn’t know it at the age of eight, but Edolo was an excellent jazz trumpeter. I never heard him play back then, but he taught me how to make the notes, how to read music, and how to play melodies. We never talked about improvising. I didn’t start to learn to improvise until the seventies, and I learned on my own. But Edolo kept playing with his friends in my hometown, even after he had to give up the trumpet, because he also played jazz violin. In 2007, he called me up and invited me to play with him on this TV show. By then I’d heard tapes of him in the fifties and knew he was my kind of player, and he knew of my career in Roomful and beyond. So I went up and did the show. Edolo was 96 that year, and he and I traded solos on violin and cornet. We fit together perfectly. What were the odds of that? It’s my most favorite moment – among a lot of favorites.

“As a brass player and singer, I practice every day without fail, to keep sharp. I’m on a big cycle yearly, where I write the songs in the spring, make demos, work on vocals through the summer, arrange and write horn parts in the fall, and go into the studio to record in January. I’ve done that for twenty years, basically, with last year being the exception as I said. I’m a creature of habit, and I take my cue from Nature – which doesn’t get tired. So neither do I.” (Photo: Al Basile’s various albums)

How has your experience with the “golden era” of rhythm n’ blues influenced the way you compose and perform today? From the musical and feeling point of view is there any difference between the old and great bluesmen and the young blues musicians?

In Roomful in the seventies, were playing classic blues, swing, and R&B from the thirties to the fifties. Aside from the bands we influenced – and there were a few – no one else was playing the repertoire in those days. When we worked with older jazz, blues, and R&B guys like Cleanhead Vinson and Red Prysock, they were surprised that we had the feeling right. But that was music we loved, so we learned it.

I’ve written and recorded some tunes in that style – Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, etc. but I use more modern models  more of the time - soul-blues from the fifties and sixties – but the feeling is there underneath all the styles, and Roomful really taught me well. As to the difference in the music and the feeling with younger players today – there will always be some who were born out of their time, so to speak, like we were, who can access the older feelings and styles. These are also those who want to bring blues style forward, and some of them find convincing ways to do that. Then there are some who take it too far, and I can’t hear the blues feeling any more. You get all kinds. But just like the older guys felt a kinship to us, even though were young white guys, we find younger players with whom we feel that kinship now. They just aren’t that numerous.

What are you doing to keep your music relevant today, to develop it and present it to the new generation?

I try to make it sound good. The technical side of music has come a long way, so I try to take advantage of that and make great sounding records. Maybe young people don’t care much about that nowadays and are satisfied with MP3s, but I make the best sounding records I can – they can always get compressed for public tastes. As a writer, I always try to write about the emotional situations that blues has always been about – because they’re timeless. Look at the last song on Blues in Hand, “When You Lose Your Money.” I guarantee that people would have gotten that message a hundred years ago, and they will in a hundred years too. My lyrics don’t date because they’re about being human, and what that means – how people are and how we treat each other. So they’re accessible to anyone at any time. These songs will make sense to people long after I’m dead – if anyone is listening.

Al Basile - Home

 (Al Basile / Photo by Meghan Sepe)