eMusic Q&A: James "Blood" Ulmer

James “Blood” Ulmer crashed into public consciousness more than a quarter-century ago as a protégé of avant garde jazz master Ornette Coleman, juicing up Coleman’s funky, “harmolodic” pretzel logic with torrid electric guitar. The new millennium found Ulmer reinventing himself as a gutbucket blues artist under the guidance of Black Rock Coalition founder and ex-Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid. The thread between the two styles is Blood’s characteristic blend of visceral passion and plainspoken irreverence.

In 2005, Ulmer released Birthright, a solo delta blues disc brimming with intimate narratives and a no-frills immediacy reminiscent of Leadbelly, Son House, and Mississippi Fred McDowell. Last December, he reunited his Memphis Blood Blues Band at Piety Street Studios in New Orleans to record Bad Blood in the City, a scabrous indictment of government inaction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Comprised of both searing Ulmer originals and kindred, once-again topical covers from the blues catalogue, it was released in early May 2007.

eMusic: There has always been a cynicism in your work about the ability of government officials and people in power help safeguard folks like the victims of Hurricane Katrina, going at least as far back as Are You Glad to Be in America from 1980. So how surprised were you at the scale of the incompetence and neglect that arose out of Katrina?

James “Blood” Ulmer: I’m not sure it is cynical. Cynical means — look, I was born in South Carolina in the 1940s; that should tell you something. It was about 14 years before television came out, and I still knew poor folk needed help. That’s been going on every year since I was born — they need more allies. The same with Katrina. Writing songs about it, drawing pictures about it, doing museum shows about it would all help the situation. Because I am a musician, I have the opportunity to write songs about it, hopefully so it will be an everlasting reminder about what is going on and what needs to be addressed. It ain’t ever going to be repealed, but it still needs to be addressed. If we were all trying to make it good, many of the things in New Orleans would already be repaired. But everybody is not trying to make it good.

eMusic: Many people see the insufficient response to Katrina as the beginning of Bush’s plunge in popularity among Americans. Did it change the political landscape?

JBU: No, I think that would be hard because when you have a society controlled by Democrats and Republicans, it doesn’t matter what shoe you are wearing. Democrats are on the opposite side now but if you switched it, it would still be the same problem, whether it is Bush or Clinton or whatever. But I am not a political man. I try and be a spiritual man.

eMusic: There are a number of really riveting Katrina-related songs you wrote for Bad Blood in the City and the press release for it says they came out in a rush. What was the process for it?

JBU: I think all the things you write are in response to something. It has to be something that is revealed to my brain. I don’t try to put myself in a “writing situation” or anything like that. It should just come to you like anything else. I can’t be sitting in my house and say, “Oh I am going to write something now,” because then you are just making things up. A song comes from inside — it is not natural thinking. I have written songs but I really like it when the verses are more revealed to me, not me making it up. It wasn’t my thoughts that made those songs happen; it was something else. I didn’t build no levees or anything; it wasn’t my story.

eMusic: What was the first one you wrote?

JBU: It didn’t make it on the record. I wrote about 14, 15 songs and Vernon [Reid, the producer of Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions] liked the five he chose the most. One of those songs, “Let’s Talk About Jesus,” was not necessarily about Katrina. But all of the other songs we used weren’t either; most of them, like “This Land Is No One’s Land,” which is a slow blues by John Lee Hooker, were written a long time ago. But they all seemed to be about the same thing too, related to Katrina. I can’t take credit for that. Vernon did a great job of picking the songs. It was his idea of how he wanted to put me in that situation, a very valid thing for him [to do] as a producer.

eMusic: What is your favorite of the ones you wrote?

JBU: None of them are my favorites, none of that shit. There shouldn’t be any favorites because this is so, so sad. The Katrina story is a sad story that needs to be addressed so that it should never happen again. It is a situation that should never have existed anyway. It was messed up down there. I was just talking about what those people were saying; it was their story, not mine. They were standing in muddy water, they knew it was contaminated, that’s wrong. The woman who told me, she knew what was happening. That’s her story and I can’t change what she told me. So none of those songs were favorites, but they were songs that addressed something in a serious way because it has to be done. People say to me, “Don’t you think it is kind of late to be doing Katrina songs?” And I said, “Late?! These are peoples’ lives!”

eMusic: You went down to New Orleans to record this. What was that like?

JBU: It was the worst thing that happened to me in all my life of playing music. First, I lost a great friend that same week. Then I got hoarse. Then my guitar broke, one I’d been playing for 30, 40 years and I had to borrow another one to finish the session. Then I when I was back in New York I had to overdub on the songs because of my voice. And it all just reminded me of all the trouble that still exists there. I was down there about for most of a week and all that time I was experiencing what was going on down there, the trouble and depression and unrest. I was deeply hoarse too, so I went through a valley of trouble. And what happened is, it came out real good because I was feeling a little of what it was like going down for those people.

eMusic: You probably hear this a lot, and are sick of hearing it, but the blues has been in decline as an art form. Why do you suppose that is happening and can anything be done about it?

JBU: To me, the concept and structure of the blues is not dying. It is just that they have watered the concept down so much, until people are not really interested in it as much. The original blues brought you information and healing; it always made you feel better or gave you something you could use. The blues is not really a music; it is more of a concept. And it is a very, very free concept. But people have integrated it into so many different things, and it became about self-satisfaction — about themselves, about a girl, about how they were goin’ to Mississippi or goin’ to Georgia. The blues I know is a concept that should be kept in your heart. It is an art form that way. It should not be deleted in your heart, it should be repaired in your heart.

eMusic: Who did you listen to growing up?

JBU: I played gospel. My daddy started me playing guitar when I was four and I was in a group when I was nine and stayed in the group until I was 15. The Southern Sons. It was a real gospel quartet, like the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and we went around different places. I sang baritone and played the guitar, all my child-life.

eMusic: You’ve played all kinds of music, playing in funk bands around Pittsburgh in your teens, and then jazz in New York City and then you eventually fell in with Ornette Coleman and made harmolodic jazz music, played some amazing, wailing guitar. I remember records like Captain Black back in the late '70s. Then you started blending that with the blues and then in the 21st century it is like you took this big turn into straight blues with Vernon Reid and you’ve been there ever since. How did that happen?

JBU: For about three years, Vernon kept saying, “I want to produce you; I want to make a blues record.” And when I thought of blues I thought of my mama and church blues, where everybody sung about God and not about yourself. So when Vernon brought the idea to me, I told him the only thing I wanted to do was choose the songs that had a message in them, that would be of value to people. And the other thing, the other challenge to me, was I’d made forty CDs, including bootlegs, and I thought, “You’ve been doing your music all your life. Can you do the blues? Can you do somebody else’s music?” And I decided that if I can it will make me stronger the next time I want to do my own music. But the blues should be in its original form, especially in this country. The blues is like a preacher in a pulpit, telling you what is real, real fast, and putting the rhythm to words. The blues might even be faster than a preacher, get you the message in three minutes or less.

eMusic: I love the new record but I miss that wailing guitar you used to play.

JBU: Well, Vernon is the producer, not me. If I had produced, it would always be like Captain Black. My greatest ambition is to have a blues record duo with Ornette Coleman playing alto and me playing guitar — we don’t need no drums. But [Vernon] didn’t want that. Nobody should be stuck on one thing. I am trying desperately to get back to being a harmolodic musician and I am going to be doing more harmolodic music. I am not a commercial artist. I do what I am doing and that will never be just one thing. I’m glad I did [Bad Blood] and I’ll be glad when I do the next thing I do.