Duke Talks Bird, And We Don’t Mean Turkey

Iconic New England guitarist pays homage to the ‘territory’ in his playing

Nov 24, 2024

Duke Robillard (Photo credit Waterbury Palace Theater)

(New England guitar legends Duke Robillard and Gerry Beaudoin will be appearing Friday night at The Palace Theater’s Poli Club in Waterbury, Conn., melding their jazz, blues, and swing mastery. Showtimes are at 7 and 9.)

Deluded Virginians may try to tell you differently, but Thanksgiving’s accepted origins are a New England thing. The whole idea of a huge feast and a moment of gratitude after the harvest in late fall started in Massachusetts (OK, Plimoth) and was gradually adopted throughout the land.

And, in his own way, Duke Robillard, a New England musical icon if there ever was one, is paying it back by sharing his love for the music that originated in the old Southwest of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, birthplace of swing and the great crucible that melded the blues, jazz and country music played by “territory bands” like Count Basie’s early groups, Walter Page’s Blue Devils, and the Jay McShann Orchestra (keep that name in mind, now).

When Rhode Island native Duke co-founded Roomful of Blues, the longtime standard for a horn-infused blues and jump band more than 50 years ago, he had that old sound in mind.

“In the early 1970s, I wanted Roomful to sound like a Kansas City swing band,” Duke told 8495Jazz. “The best ones were all blues bands for the most part – Basie’s and McShann’s bands being primary examples.”

Duke is eagerly awaiting his reunion Friday night in Waterbury with Gerry Beaudoin, the Berklee College of Music alum whose jazz style weaves in and out with Duke’s self-described melodic swing. Friday’s show, which features Duke and Gerry’s trio, won’t be the first time they have played together – they collaborated with the late Jay Geils years ago in the New Guitar Summit in performances and in the studio, trading licks. Those licks partially came from their contrasting professional histories, but they also came from a shared love of early swing guitarists.

“The thing that brought us together was the love of early electric jazz guitar, guys like Charlie Christian, Tiny Grimes, Bill Jennings, and Barney Kessel. There are a lot of guitar players who have an affinity for that era of late 1930’s and early 1940’s style jazz guitar when it was very pure and very blues-oriented. Jay and I were blues-oriented and Gerry was a schooled jazz musician coming from the other end but he also appreciated that style.”

There will, alas, be no more work from the trio – Geils died in 2017 – but Duke said he expects he and Gerry will have a great time playing together in the moment.

“With three guitars, it was more arranged and worked out,” Duke said. “This is a little more open and in kind of the spirit of real jazz where we’ll be responding to each other more than anything else. That makes it fun and spontaneous and anything can happen.”

Friday’s show should work well for the casual listener – “They’ll still just understand we are two different voices and have a different sound and what we play together will be enjoyable and different. I don’t think they need to know why,” Duke said.

But for the more theory-oriented listener, and popular music historians, the show might also serve as a salient opportunity to see how the world of jazz, blues, and R&B all tie together, whether it’s played on Vine Street in KC or on the New England coast.

One of Duke’s fruitful and self-described enjoyable collaborations over the years was with McShann, one of the first bandleaders to carry saxophone colossus Charlie “Bird” Parker in his band. While one might think it may take a while to connect the dots between Duke’s melodic swing and the primary author of bebop, Duke said it’s not a big lift.

“Most people wouldn’t even put us in the same universe, but Charlie was a great blues player and had the blues feeling,” Duke said. “He developed it and even invented chord progressions based on the blues that were much more sophisticated and complicated, but it was still the blues. And he loved to play the blues. You hear it in a lot of his playing. And, in fact, my song ‘Jesse’s Blues’ opens with a line from Bird because it is such beautiful blues playing. It sets it up for me to play a more melodic blues.”

Duke’s lost nothing on knowing how to make those melodic blues sound good; his recent Roll With Me album, which includes songs going back 20 years and newer ones, is doing well on blues radio charts. Two of the songs, “Blue Coat Man” and “Just Kiss Me,” were at Number 1 and Number 3 in the Roots Music report of Nov. 16.

But he also said he hears that current audiences aren’t taking the same inspiration from the founding fathers of swing he did, which puzzles him.

“I’ve played with a lot of the old masters,” he said. “In fact, Roomful opened for Basie three or four times. But when I go to the local record store, the guy tells me nobody buys Basie or Ellington anymore, and I ask him ‘Are people crazy?’ That’s some of the best music ever recorded. I can listen to a Basie record from the late 1930’s and it sounds like it could be recorded yesterday. There’s so much energy.”