Playing the Blues a Family Tradition for Kinsey Report

Playing the blues is a family affair for the Kinsey Report. The Gary, Ind., quartet includes brothers Donald, Ralph and Kenneth Kinsey. Family patriarch Lester (Big Daddy) Kinsey played a key role in grooming his sons for a blues career.

The group, which opens a four-day Southern California swing tonight at the Lighthouse Cafe, weaves rock, funk and reggae influences into a hard-edged Chicago blues style highlighted by Donald’s smooth vocals and fluid lead guitar. But according to the singer, 35, talent wasn’t the only factor in the Kinsey Report’s recent emergence as the most impressive contemporary blues unit this side of the Robert Cray Band.

“There’s that determination with us,” he said during a recent phone interview from San Francisco. “I knew that blues is us. . . . It’s in our blood, it’s in our bones and I’m just determined to keep doing it every day so people will at least know we exist.”

The Kinsey Report also plays Friday at the Music Machine, Saturday at the Belly Up in Solana Beach and Sunday at the Long Beach Blues Festival. In addition to its own sets, the quartet will back Big Daddy Kinsey and his harmonica-playing cohort Mad Dog Lester.

“With my father on this tour, the people get a sense of history from the performance,” said Donald. “They get a sense of the traditional blues and see how it all came from the same seed. The blues started with my dad, was passed on to us and we’ve taken it further.”

The Kinsey clan literally grew up with the blues. Donald was 5 when Big Daddy gave him his first guitar, and by 13 he was being featured as “B. B. King Jr.” at his father’s gigs around Gary. Summer vacation during Donald’s and drummer Ralph’s teen years meant barnstorming tours through Memphis and the Mississippi Delta.

Donald joined Albert King’s band in 1972 and spent three years with the guitar giant. He then formed the power trio White Lightning with Ralph, recording one album for Island and hitting the arena-rock circuit with groups like ZZ Top, Jethro Tull and Aerosmith.

White Lightning was short-lived, but thanks to the Island Records connection, Kinsey soon began providing blues-influenced guitar leads on major reggae albums like Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” and Bob Marley’s “Rastaman Vibration.”

Kinsey, who regarded reggae as Jamaican blues, adapted so well to the style that he toured with Tosh and moved to Kingston to join Marley’s band the Wailers in 1976. But Kinsey soured on Jamaican life when he was trapped in the same room with Marley during an assassination attempt on the singer.

He worked more frequently with Tosh, appearing on his 1978 tour with the Rolling Stones. Donald also went on the road for Tosh’s final tour in 1984, but family ties--and the blues--were beckoning.

“Everything was telling me, ‘Donald, now’s the time to go home and pull together with your brothers,’ ” Kinsey, who had relocated to San Francisco, recalled. “I always felt that ultimately we would come back together as a family and do something. Every time I came home, it was like coming home to the blues and I always enjoyed that. There was something about reminiscing, just me and my dad alone, that really rejuvenated my spirit.”

The Kinsey Report (which also includes the brothers’ longtime friend Ron Prince on guitar) formed in ’84. Its first recording project was Big Daddy’s “Bad Situation” album. A Kinsey Report track recorded for Alligator’s “New Bluebloods” compilation of up-and-coming blues artists led to the deal for “Edge of the City,” the group’s invigorating debut album for the Chicago-based independent label.

The coming months will be spent writing and recording albums for the Kinsey Report and Big Daddy Kinsey. And Donald Kinsey feels the musical tide is definitely running in their direction.

“There’s a limit to how far you can go with electronic, mechanical music with no feeling whatsoever before you have to get back down to something natural,” he declared. “All the so-called pop artists are coming to rhythm & blues now.

“My man Steve Winwood, on ‘Roll With It’--if he hadn’t (sung) anything, I would have sworn that was Jr. Walker & the All Stars. They say everything goes around in a cycle and it’s all coming back to the natural feel. And that’s blues.”