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It's hard to believe, when you look at John Bigham's résumé and listen to his new album, that the guy really hasn't played the blues all that much in his career.
The album - "The Good Girl Blues" due out in June - sounds like a textbook on the genre, its 12 tracks covering different chapters. Traditional Southern blues, Memphis blues, R&B, gospel; it's all there, and it's all very, very good.
And Bigham's résumé details a long and varied career in just about every African American-dominated form of music there is: He's played jazz with Miles Davis, was a longtime member of the pioneering funk-rock band Fishbone and has worked with hip-hop paragon Dr. Dre.
Conspicuously absent: A major stint in a blues band.
Which begs the question: How did this man make a blues record this great?
For one thing, Bigham, whose band The Soul of John Black will play in Bend on Saturday (see "If You Go"), grew up in one of the country's most fertile towns for blues music.
"I'm from Chicago, and my parents were there during the heyday," Bigham said in a telephone interview from his home in Hollywood, Calif. "I've always heard it and I've always loved both the early blues and the later R&B stuff. I just like the way they talk and the stuff they say and the feeling of it."
But he never quite got around to playing the stuff until a couple of years ago, when he was asked to score a short film based in the early 20th-century South called "A Single Rose." To make it work, Bigham took his bucket of talent, poured in his years of listening to the music, and mixed in a few tricks for turning "any song into a blues song," he said. (For the music majors: Just add sevenths to the chords. OK, it's probably not that simple.)
"I started experimenting with a few of my songs for the movie and it worked out," said Bigham, who declined to reveal his age. "I was turning all these songs that I had into blues songs and they were turning out pretty good.
"I was surprised. I was like, 'Wow, OK, I like this!'"
The Soul of John Black already had one album under its belt, a rootsy, genre-hopping, self-titled effort released in 2003. When it came time to work on a follow-up, Bigham decided to continue mining the vein he'd been working for the film.
"After I did ('A Single Rose')," he said, "it was just there for me to explore."
What came out was truly an exploration of a genre, with Bigham - whom Mix Magazine called "one of the new faces of soul" - acting as tour guide. Stops along the way include an old-school, Leadbelly-style Southern wail ("The Hole"), a gritty, bass-driven, classic blues tune ("Good Girl"), a swampy showcase for Bigham's considerable slide-guitar skills ("Slippin' And Slidin'"), and the best track, "One Hit," which sounds like a gospel song with a pop chorus until you realize it's about a prostitute's overdose.
It's a fascinating tour, to say the least. To be fair, though, Bigham is more than just a tour guide on this trip - he plans the route, sells the tickets, and fixes the bus when it breaks down, too. He wrote all the songs on "The Good Girl Blues," sang all the lead vocals, played all the guitars and drums, and recorded the whole thing himself in his home.
That's a lot of responsibility, but it's also what Bigham wanted when he started The Soul of John Black back in 1996.
"I just wanted to be able to take a chance at anything I wanted to do," he said. "When I get these ideas about the music I want to do, I have a pretty clear vision. I felt like I needed to go out on my own to accomplish that.
"I wanted to play music forever, and I wanted to do it on my terms," Bigham said. "I just wanted to be my own boss. I wanted to see it through because I feel so strongly about these ideas."
One of those ideas was for The Soul of John Black to be a dark, mysterious kind of thing, thus the titular "alter-ego," Bigham said. With this band, Bigham isn't Bigham. He's John Black, and the concept - borrowed from the 1976 blaxploitation horror film "J.D.'s Revenge" - is that Black was a great Chicago soul singer who was killed coming out of a club and has now inhabited Bigham's body.
So let's get this straight: Bigham is a career sideman ... who finally decided to head up his own band ... only to take on a fictional persona. If it seems like he's not quite comfortable with that role, it's probably because he isn't.
"I never stepped out like this before," Bigham said. "When I played with Fishbone and anyone else ... I liked to hang in the back and just play. When I step out in front, I'm more the shy guy, or more the reserved guy."
He is, however, getting used to being at the front of the stage. Or John Black is. One of the two.
"If you're going to be a frontman, you have to engage people," Bigham said. "If I'm going to do it, I want to do it all the way. I want to be engaging and step out there and let the full personality of The Soul of John Black come out."
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