Siegel celebrates 50 years of classical-blues blend with Chamber Blues show at the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks
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Four years into his career as a musician, Corky Siegel says, his parents thought he was “a bum.”
“And they were right,” the blues piano and harmonica player says by phone from Chicago, where he lives.
That all changed July 7, 1968.
“We got the symphony gig,” Siegel says, “my parents, all of a sudden I couldn’t do anything wrong.”
The “symphony gig” was a guest appearance by The Siegel-Schwall Blues Band with Maestro Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Together, they premiered William Russo’s “Three Pieces for Blues Band and Orchestra” at the Ravinia Festival that night, and in the process, they set Siegel on the musical path he’s pursued ever since, most often with his Chamber Blues ensemble, which performs Sunday at the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks.
“We weren’t using the orchestra to back a blues band,” he says. “We wanted the music to intertwine and blend.”
Russo wrote a wondrous, delightful work in which the blues band and orchestra engage in a genuine conversation and synthesis of classical and blues music.
“If we had done it in a way that wasn’t an experiment, it wouldn’t have been symphonic blues,” Siegel says. “So Seiji and Bill and I agreed we would do something for everyone to dislike.”
Instead, the band and Ozawa performed it again and again with orchestras all over the country and released it on album in 1973.
After Siegel-Schwall disbanded in 1974, Siegel partnered again with Russo and Ozawa for 1977’s “Street Music,” and he began to receive commissions from orchestras to write his own symphonic blues works — he’s up to seven now.
In 1983, however, he hit upon the idea for Chamber Blues, which made its debut in 1988.
In addition to Siegel on piano and harmonica, Chamber Blues includes the West End String Quartet and tabla player Kalyan Pathak. Sunday’s concert also features singer Lynne Jordan, who the late film critic Roger Ebert once called his “favorite diva.”
“It meant the world to me,” she says by phone from her home in Chicago about Ebert’s praise. “It made me feel great, and I think I particularly needed that at the time. I probably had some wedding client giving me a hard time.”
Siegel and Jordan have known each for a few years, first from running into each other at Chicago’s City Winery and then from a gig where he hired her to sing with him.
“They wanted a vocalist, besides me, not that they didn’t love my brilliant vocals,” he says, “but they wanted someone else also.”
A friendship and further collaborations quickly ensued.
“First of all, what makes any musician special is more about who they are then what they do,” Siegel says about Jordan. “It’s become more and more and more that way. It’s a complete priority. We call it heart. We call it kindness. We call it understanding why we play music. Lynne is the personification of kindness and beauty and joy.”
Among other highlights, Sunday’s program includes two Nina Simone songs — Jordan has an entire show devoted to the singer’s music — that Siegel arranged for Chamber Blues.
“That’s a straight blues with gorgeous, lush string things that Corky has composed,” she says about Simone’s “Do I Move You?”
“Soulful, serious and funny all at the same time,” he says about the song. “There’s a line in the song, ‘Do I move you? The answer better be yes.’ Brilliant.”
The other Simone song is “Mr. Backlash” (also known as “Backlash Blues”), one of her civil rights songs, this one addressed to whites who resisted the movement.
“This is the perfect song for our times,” Siegel says, “since we’ll be going through the whole civil rights movement all over again.”
Langston Hughes wrote the lyrics and gave them to Simone to set to music.
“When she was doing the protest music — people don’t realize she was a star, about to be a superstar and she started doing protest music and none of her peers were doing that, not Aretha until later,” Jordan says. “Her stuff was out there.”
The program also includes Siegel’s arrangement of Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” his song “One,” Jordan’s “Roly-Poly” and several of Chamber Blues’ established works.
A soulful jazz singer with a wide musical and emotional range, Jordan says Chamber Blues is right up her alley.
“I love strings,” she says. “The merging of the two. It’s challenging. I love it. It’s nice to step out of the box. … The whole chamber blues concept is really fun and surprising and lovely.”
Who: Corky Siegel's Chamber Blues with Lynne Jordan
Where: The Acorn Theater, 107 Generations Drive, Three Oaks
When: 5 p.m. Sunday
Cost: $30-$15
For more information: Call 269-756-3879 or visit acorntheater.org
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Siegel celebrates 50 years of classical-blues blend with Chamber Blues show at the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks
