Harmonica hotshots hold a blowout

By Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003

The occasion may have been a star-studded 60th birthday party for Waltham-based blues harmonica legend Jerry Portnoy, but Tuesday night's tribute at Scullers Jazz Club was, ultimately, a celebration of something timeless, if increasingly commercially marginalized: the music behind the man.

Apart from his performing a few instrumental numbers that bookended a dazzling two-hour show -- his sultry, ruminative "Blues in a Dream" was a masterful highlight -- Portnoy opted to hang back in the shadows and watch, and delight in, the harmonica-laced history being made by his peers and disciples on the well-lighted Scullers stage.

"I ain't staying up here long," Portnoy announced to a seated but enthusiastic audience of blues diehards. "As Leslie Gore said, it's my party and I can do what I want to."

The sentiment was entirely understandable. As a musician who cut his teeth in the electric blues mecca of Chicago, joined the band of its most legendary resident, Muddy Waters, during the 1970s, and spent a good chunk of the '90s recording and touring with Eric Clapton, Portnoy has spent at least half his life in the spotlight.

Besides, like everybody else in the room, he wanted to hear the harp hotshots -- the Fabulous Thunderbirds' Kim Wilson; Rick Estrin; Paul Lamb; Sonny Jr.; Mike Turk -- all gathered under one roof.

With supple backing from a band that included, among others, the splendid Otis Spann-style pianist David Maxwell (a member, along with Portnoy and guitarist Jay Geils, of the Boston Blues Explosion) and guitarist Troy Gonyea (a Worcester native who's playing guitar with the Fabulous Thunderbirds), each harmonica virtuoso offered his own interpretation of the music's signature instrument.

Estrin's greased pompadour and mustache were as slick and entertaining as his playing -- a teasing, flirting assortment of notes that he chased with quickly clustered runs capped by a mouth-only (look man, no hands) approach. Lamb and Sonny Jr. paid marvelous tribute to harp originator Sonny Terry on the jousting call-and-response of "Mean Woman Blues." Turk took a balmy, breezy instrumental stroll with his chromatic harmonica on "Just Squeeze Me" that generously expanded into individual solos all around the bandstand.

"Everybody's been playing this fast stuff all night," said Wilson, who closed the show before Portnoy returned for a quick encore. "I think I'm gonna slow it down." And slow things down he did, offering a brooding, bracing number that played equally to both his strengths as an imaginative harp stylist and to his gruff-guy power as a frontman for one of the most commercially popular blues-rock outfits of the past two decades.

The blues royalty didn't end there. A handful of New England (transplanted or otherwise) guitarists also offered brief but distinct and pungent turns. Ex-Muddy Waters sideman Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson (Portnoy's longtime partner in his post-Waters outfit the Legendary Blues Band) was a commanding presence on a simmering "You Better Check Yourself."

Later, the J. Geils Band founder, guitarist, and namesake joined Roomful of Blues architect Duke Robillard in a stinging recommendation to "Keep Your Woman Satisfied." Robillard's poly-style blend of boisterous jump blues, robust R&B, and honking Chuck Berry-via-Bill Haley guitar on "Blue Coat Man" steered the music in a direction that linked the idioms of the past with a stubborn verve, and testified to its still-vital, if diminished, connection to a modern present -- a present that hasn't always been as kind to its roots in return.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company

(source: http://www.boston.com:80/news/globe/living/articles/2003/11/29/harmonica_hotshots_hold_a_blowout)