POP MUSIC REVIEW : Blowdown: The Blues in, Through the Night

By its name, you’d suppose that the eighth annual Blues Harmonica Blowdown would be a lung-powered cutting contest, with laurels going to whoever was left standing after all the gusts had died down.

But far from presenting the blues as a zero-sum game that tries to winnow the losers from the winners, this satisfying (if, at six hours, overlong) sold-out program Saturday night at the Strand suggested that the blues are an open door through which musicians of varying temperaments and styles are welcome to enter.

For this evening, at least, player after player and band after band went through that door and found something on the other side that brought out the vitality in them.

There were seven acts, with a strong streak of Orange (County, that is) to go with the blue. The top of the bill featured the loving but playfully rendered traditionalism of the reunited Hollywood Fats Band, the reinvigorated sizzle of the recently revamped James Harman Band and the idiosyncratic jamming of Carey Bell Harrington, who got his schooling on the 1950s Chicago blues scene that the two younger headliners absorbed from afar.

A solid undercard of Southern California bluesmen featured young veteran Robert Lucas, playing a tradition-minded solo-acoustic set, and elderly veteran Blind Joe Hill, who looked fragile in a comeback performance after heart surgery, but sounded sure and steady when blowing his harp.

Harmonica Fats, another longtime presence on the Los Angeles blues scene, was casual about playing his namesake but made a strong impression with gritty, biting vocals and his trademark stage antics. Flat Top Tom and his Jump Cats also emphasized showmanship. Their swinging, up-tempo blues were tightly played, but the big treat was watching leader Tom Hall and a dance partner do a flashy jitterbug.

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The Hollywood Fats Band’s reunion followed the recent reissue of “Rock This House,” an obscure late-’70s album that was the L.A./Orange County unit’s only release. Band leader Michael (Hollywood Fats) Mann died in 1986 at age 32; the four other charter members were back, along with a player ideally suited by ability and background to stand in for the prodigious Fats (whom Blowdown organizer Bernie Pearl recalled in his introduction as “a genius of the blues”).

That would be David (Kid) Ramos, the Anaheim resident who formed an explosive blues guitar tandem with Fats in the early- to mid-’80s lineup of the Harman Band. Ramos, 35, was amazingly fluent as he probed and skipped across the strings of his hollow-body electric guitar. More than expertise, he brings to bear the extra presence and snap that separates skillful players from special ones. Ramos’ solos won ovations, and when playing in a supporting role his performance had the same attentive, fully engaged quality that is Hollywood Fats’ hallmark on the “Rock This House” album.

That was true of the entire band. Fred Kaplan is a tasty piano player, coyly trilling along. Richard Innes is the sort of drummer who makes the players in front of him more vivid by lending just the right accent at just the right time--an intensification or drop in dynamic, or a syncopated embellishment that provides an always moving, ever-reactive framework for what the soloists are doing.

In his thin-framed glasses and fedora and with his low-keyed stage manner, front man Al Blake called James Joyce to mind more readily than any blues forebears. But his performance had all the intensity and range of inflection needed to carry music culled from ‘50s Chicago blues.

Drawling here, adding some wryly plaintive intensifying notes there, Blake sounded anything but professorial. He opened the show with an unaccompanied harmonica segment that showed his range on the instrument, from clean, sprightly lines to thick-toned moans. Between songs, the Laguna Beach resident displayed a scholar’s knowledge and a lover’s fondness for the music. Surveying the packed house for this year’s Blowdown, Blake mused at one point: “Maybe next year we’ll be at Dodger Stadium. Who knows?”

Not likely. But if the Hollywood Fats Band elects to keep going instead of just playing occasional reunions, it would be a classy and no doubt well-received addition to any major blues festival. The only thing lacking in this set was time. With 45 minutes, the band wasn’t able to fit in a headlong, jumping burner in which Blake’s harp could play a speeding tag game with Ramos’ guitar.

The set’s excellence, and particularly Ramos’ prominent part in making it so, paved the way for some extracurricular drama--maybe not quite a competitive challenge, but an inevitable comparison begging to be made. Next up would be the James Harman Band, and with it a new, very young guitar player occupying the slot that Ramos himself held for many years until his departure from the band in 1988. Inheriting the crowd that the muscular Ramos had just ignited was Robby (Sugar Boy) Eason--blond, slender, and looking every bit his age, which is 18.

Not to minimize Ramos’ excellence in the least, but Eason probably was the guitarist who most in the audience went home raving about. Slinging a Stratocaster and playing a totally different style than Ramos, the new kid was a revelation. With Jimmie Vaughan-style thrust implicit in his playing, the San Diego resident betrayed no nervousness, just focused intensity, and he played with a combination of vigor, taste and control that by all rights should be utterly beyond anyone his age. His solos shot through the room, and his work within the ensemble was colorful and energetic. Word is going to get around, fast.

Harman himself has never been less than a spirited performer. With Eason and a sharp new drummer, Michael Cherry, in his band (as well as solid holdover Jeff Turmes on bass and slide guitar), he sounded positively inspired. The bandleader from Huntington Beach was at the top of his game both vocally and on the harmonica--shifting hues constantly in a performance brimming with free-flowing spontaneity and delight.

The 65-minute set featured four songs from “Cards on the Table,” a new album due in mid-May. The opening salvo, “Night Ridin’ Daddy,” was a striking new number, cool yet steamy, coursing with a tense sexuality. Harman kept that tension going through the first few songs before moving toward more broadly humorous fare including another good new one, “Three Way Party.”

Harman’s two studio albums since the loss of Hollywood Fats and Ramos have taken a laid-back, ultra-traditional approach, but material from them sounded newly boisterous as well. (The Harman Band will play April 1 at Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim and April 2 at the Heritage Brewing Co. in Dana Point.)

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Carey Bell Harrington (who drops his last name for the stage, performing as Carey Bell) turned in a jam-oriented concluding set that showcased his virtuosic command of the harmonica. Using a chromatic harp, a larger variant of the standard harmonica, he produced whirls of breath that could come out clean and sprightly like an accordion, thickly swirling like a Hammond B3 organ, or just crusty and tough, like a Chicago blues harp is supposed to sound.

He also was an engaging singer, favoring bright, conversational tones. His prolonged jams with the Bernie Pearl Band, which provided backup for three of the seven acts, featured frequent humorous byplay between Bell’s chattering harmonica and Hollis Gilmore’s sure, unflappable tenor saxophone.

With his weathered face and slumped shoulders, Bell, in his late 50s, looks a bit droopy. But on stage he was full of life, even if the audience wasn’t as his set continued on past 1:30 a.m. to an ever sparser crowd.