‘A NIGHT AT ANTONE’S’ : MUSIC MACHINE TURNS BLUES JUKE JOINT FOR THE WEEKEND

One part Caravan of Stars, two parts jam session and all the way live, “A Night at Antone’s” pulled into the Music Machine for two shows over the weekend, bringing Los Angelenos a taste of the ambiance of the Austin, Tex., club that’s served as home and riding partner to the Blues for the past 12 years.

Highlights of the traveling roadshow on Friday included a pair of hair-on-the-walls guitar solos from frenetic Chicago axeman Buddy Guy, wailing harmonicat James Cotton reaching deep into his medicine-show stopping bag of tricks for his pair of crowd-pleasers, and a couple of graduate school seminars in blues drumming and bass-playing from the former Muddy Waters team of Willie (Big Eye) Smith and Calvin Jones, respectively.

It wasn’t so much the vintage posters announcing legendary blues performers at the original Antone’s, nor the impromptu souvenir stand doing a brisk business selling Antone’s T-shirts, photo books and albums, nor even the home-cooked chili with cornbread on the side available at the back of the club for $2.50 a serving that elevated the evening beyond your usual blues show.

Other shows sport stars of equal magnitude. Other shows serve food. What 37-year-old club-owner Clifford Antone has done, apparently, is to cultivate and formulate a hothouse atmosphere of informality that blurs the line between jazz and blues. Clad in a baggy gray suit, Antone himself spent half the night at stage right, shuffling musicians on and off stage in various combo-nations.

Unlike a pop show, where the audience comes to hear the hits delivered in a more or less familiar fashion, Antone’s method is to gather a bunch of talented musicians and let them take, say, a shuffle in G into the realm of spontaneous combustion.

The best example of this at the Music Machine came about three rounds into the evening when barrelhouse pianist Pinetop Perkins and guitarists Luther Tucker and Jimmy Rogers teamed with Cotton, Smith and Jones.

Everybody got a double shot of the spotlight, with Tucker’s devastating right-handiwork and exceptional skill as an accompanist burning brightest on a night when the on-stage cooking doubled, bubbled, toiled and troubled around the boiling point more often than not.

Antone’s is also known as a breeding ground for the Blues, what with such latter-day pale luminaries as the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Lou Ann Barton having cut their teeth there, and the weekend lineup showcased the latest in Antone’s line of young veterans: Angela Strehli and Chris Thomas.

Backed by a tight, relaxed band, the former wowed the crowd (which was heavily populated with Texas transplants) with a solid set of soul ‘n’ blues grooves, while the latter led a quartet through a shaky series of rock-blues moves.

Super heavyweight blues songwriter Willie Dixon dropped in to howl ‘n’ woof, by which time the evening began to sink slowly, slowly into the early-morning morass of mutual admiration, cognac and genuine bonhomie that characterizes juke joints from Austin to West Los Angeles whenever the true blue flame presents itself.