Chamber Blues Project in Harmony With the Classics

Those gigs back in the ‘60s on the Chicago blues circuit had guest musicians joining the Siegel-Schwall Band on stage all the time. Here were Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter adding their voices to the band’s approximation of the American folk blues with all the passion that had inspired Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall to their own careers.

There was a certain sense to the proceedings, these veterans making music with a newer generation of players. Then in 1967, a man calling himself Seiji Ozawa began showing up at the shows.

“One night he came up to me and said he would like to know if my band would like to jam with his band,” Siegel remembers. “And his band was the Chicago Symphony.”

Ozawa, who was working as guest conductor of that esteemed unit, was proposing an experiment in non-traditional music: blending classical music with the blues. This would be a new hybrid, one that has come to dominate Siegel’s career, from live performance with symphony orchestras to musical composition.

Even now, Siegel’s passion remains his Chamber Blues project, which mingles styles of American blues with Mozart-era classical music through the aid of a string quartet, a percussionist and Siegel’s piano, harmonica and vocals. The group performs Friday at the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood.

The leader has now had a quarter-century to perfect this mix that the San Francisco Examiner has called “an adventure in rhythm, harmony and solos.”

So today it’s perhaps strange to learn that Siegel wasn’t quickly convinced of the viability of the mixture of styles. “Seiji Ozawa was continuously supporting me, suggesting strongly that I should pursue this form of music because he felt it was a viable and lasting form of classical music.”

It was a musical statement that some in traditional classical music circles were not immediately prepared for, particularly during that upheaval of art and politics in the late ‘60s. The Siegel-Schwall Band was actually greeted by boos and hisses as its members emerged with their long hair and amplifiers to join Ozawa and the New York Philharmonic for a performance at the Lincoln Center in 1969.

But after their playing of William Russo’s “Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra,” a 22-minute work commissioned for Ozawa, that same audience awarded Siegel and the others a lengthy standing ovation. “We were well-received, and it was a great thing because the booing and hissing was really a political and social statement,” Siegel says. “And the music overcame that.”

By the time the Siegel-Schwall Band dissolved in 1974, the group had performed the Russo work with the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony and other ensembles, and recorded an album for the Deutsche Grammophon label that sold more than 500,000 copies.

Siegel continued his collaboration with conductor Ozawa and composer Russo, who wrote “Street Music” for their next project. And Siegel was soon composing his own first piece in a commission for Arthur Fiedler and the San Francisco Symphony.

While approaching the composing tentatively at first, Siegel was ultimately drawn to writing this orchestral music, encouraged by Russo. “I discovered that a pop musician who works with a group and comes up with arrangements is very capable of writing music for other ensembles,” Siegel says.

It wasn’t until 1983, when Siegel arrived at the Chamber Blues concept, that the blending of the diverse classical and blues styles would finally make complete sense for him. The key ingredient, he now discovered, was the subtle atmosphere of a string quartet.

“The idea of blending those two forms in the intimacy and emotion of an ensemble like a string quartet just blew my mind,” he says.

Other artists have made a similar discovery over the years, most recently British rocker Elvis Costello, who turned to the Brodsky Quartet for this year’s critically acclaimed “The Juliet Letters” album. While that record is focused on more traditional classical forms alongside its lyrics, other contemporary ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and the Green String Quartet have mixed a broad variety of styles.

“People have always been blending idioms,” Siegel says. “That’s nothing new. I just want to credit Seiji Ozawa for being the true pioneer because when he did it there was a generation gap; he was just confronting the issue head-on, and he had his whole career at stake.”

Part of Siegel’s year is spent away from his string quartet, known independently as the West End String Quartet. He appears at a handful of shows, playing a blend of blues, country and jazz with his old partner Schwall, and performs some solo dates with Siegel acting as singer-songwriter behind piano and harmonica.

He’s usually returns soon to the odd mixture that has dictated most of his musical career, attracting crowds in tuxedos and evening gowns, T-shirts and blue jeans. “We’ve had motorcycle gang type people show up at our concerts and tell us they’re going out the next day to buy some chamber music,” he says.

But in all these years, he still hasn’t found time to undertake serious study of the classics. “I’m planning on it. It’s just that things are going so well I hate to fix it if it’s not broken. I’m real excited about studying classical music and really getting into the meat of the issue. But right now I have so much to do that can take advantage of my innocence, and I’d like to follow through with that for a while longer because I’m really having a lot of fun with it.”

Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues performs at 8 p.m. Friday at Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration Grounds, Brentwood. Tickets are $18-$14 for adults, $9 students, $9-$7 children 16 and under. Call (310) 825-2101.

CLASSIC FESTIVAL: Music by Chance, Erickson, Bukovich and others will be performed at the Cal State Northridge “Festival of Bands” on April 29. Performing are the CSUN Wind Symphony, the Pierce College Concert Band and the Agoura High School Wind Ensemble. The concert is at 8 p.m. in the campus University Student Union. Tickets are $6.50 general admission, $3.50 for seniors and students. Call (818) 885-3093.