As musical instruments go, the electric guitar is still a baby. How should it sound? What role should it play in a band? How should we tune it? All of this is still up for grabs. This was even more true in the 1970s when Kelvyn Bell was coming up.
So imagine how it felt when James Blood Ulmer tapped Kelvyn to fill Blood’s shoes in Arthur Blythe’s Quintet, a band in which Blood Ulmer was truly forging a new identity for the instrument. How did Kelvyn respond to the wide-open expanse that Blood had exposed? As Kelvyn Bell proclaimed at James Blood Ulmer’s memorial service this fall, “I’m here to declare that the harmolodic tuning of James Blood Ulmer is a sacred tuning.”
So let us share our gratitude and our awe. Kelvyn Bell joins host Mitch Goldman for a Deep Focus on James Blood Ulmer this Monday (11/09) from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org,
Or join us when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/. Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted. It’s ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial. We are closing in on 500 one-hour episodes, and we won’t even ask for your contact info. Just help yourself.
Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast.
Photo credit: James Blood Ulmer – ibk Svíčková, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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