POP MUSIC REVIEW : John Hammond’s Good-News Blues

In John Hammond’s hands, a mess of blues is certainly good news. Though the songs he voices are nearly all unremittingly sad, there is such a richness of detail and depth of feeling expressed in his voice and playing that it makes woe seem worthwhile.

And it pretty much took artistry of that magnitude to eclipse the good news that preceded his two shows Saturday night at the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library.

Hammond’s performance was part of--and potentially the last in--the Multicultural Arts Series, which for five years has presented the county with a lush tapestry of performing arts from around the world. The series was created and driven by librarian Jose Aponte, and his departure from San Juan Capistrano this month to become the head librarian in West Palm Beach, Fla.--on top of the fiscal drought our county entities are enduring--led to the cancellation of other scheduled shows and made the series’ future seem doubtful.

While any bit of warmth and culture in this county seems as rare and endangered as the gnatcatcher, the good news Saturday was that volunteers, library officials and the community have pulled together to support the series, and Multicultural committee leaders Bob Slater and Sunderajan Mutialu were able to announce before Hammond’s show that the series is continuing, notably with shows by African master drummer Obo Addy on July 22 and Japanese Taiko drummer Kenny Endo on July 30.

Most of what the series has offered is music that would otherwise never be heard locally, and as Slater noted, it is music that allows one to understand the world through the eyes of others.

The hard-touring Hammond--his gig previous to the Capistrano shows was in Istanbul--is an exception to the obscure nature of most of the library’s bookings; Hammond has appeared often at local nightspots. But his show made it clear that it’s not just the artists that make the series special. It is also the venue and audience.

There aren’t many stages where the artist can take a wistful look at the evening sky before plunging into his earthbound music, nor many where instead of bar clatter he’s playing to an open-air courtyard full of appreciative listeners, from music buffs hanging on every note to little kids spinning and dancing. And a show where all races are present, and where there’s an age span of more than 65 years between the youngest and oldest listeners, is simply how it’s supposed to be.

Though Hammond’s music is practically the most distinctly American art form there is--and there is no shortage of self-proclaimed blues bands around--he is still a rare cultural treasure, mostly because he is the sort of performer to whom terms like “rare cultural treasure” usually aren’t applied.

Sure, he’s a musicologist’s dream when it comes to replicating every shading of the blues--from dirt-floor shotgun shack plaint to citified electric swagger--but he does it with an unsettling immediacy that shows no regard for convention. He could as well be standing naked and crying on the stage for all the passion he displays in a song; shouting, pleading and weeping its lyrics, his guitar and harmonica baying along like dogs in a swamp.

Hammond reveals more vigor and expression than most artists just in his left foot, an appendage he used in songs to authoritatively pound the stage like God or John Lee Hooker, if there’s a difference between the two. There was a sensual quality to the beats, more like the elastic rhythms of lovers than the strict tempos of European music.

That’s typical of the wonderful inaccuracy he brought to the 15 classic songs of his first show Saturday. Much of the payoff in his music came from the tension he first achieved, with rhythms ever so slightly out of sync, and slide guitar notes left hovering tantalizingly shy of the pitch the music called for.

He opened with “My Daddy Was a Jockey” and “Found True Love,” respectively a bragging assertion of romantic prowess and a warm, elegant expression of love, that offset the misery driving most of the remainder of songs.

Hammond, 52, grew up in a New York City mansion, but even early on in his three decades of touring he showed a true feeling for the music. He doesn’t write his material, but makes both obscure gems and blues standards his own. Most of it is a sad lot, full of mistreating women and the assertion that someday, though evidently not today, he’ll have the strength to leave them.

While there is enough friction between the sexes to spark these songs, Hammond ignites them into a blaze, where all the misunderstandings and missed connections in the world burn like tinder, and joy is defined in dark silhouette by its absence.

In Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen,” Hammond merely singing “You’d better come on in my kitchen, because it’s going to be raining outside” seemed to create an elegy to the whole of human loneliness and trouble. There was no less depth to Johnson’s “Hellhound On My Trail,” Willie McTell’s “Love Changin’ Blues” and the minor-key “My Time After a While,” in which the lonesome whistle of a passing Amtrak added the only touch Hammond’s delivery lacked.

Like blues touchstone Johnson, Hammond has reached a point in his artistry where his voice, guitar and, in Hammond’s case, harmonica flow together, with melodic line and emotional phrase liquidly transporting from one to the other. He’d leave open places in some songs, with half-finished harmonica phrases abruptly cutting off at emotional points, as if only silence could endure there. But then, on the uproarious “Mother In Law Blues,” it seemed as if an entire and thoroughly drunk blues band, circa 1954, was living it up inside his metal-bodied National guitar. Yet even amid that clatter, there was a tremendous nuance and intelligence to his playing.

It doesn’t get much better than this. And as Hammond has shown two years running, the rare opportunity the library presents for such music to be heard pays off in art as rich and full of life as any novel.