A Piece of Artwork
Downtown’s Resident Blues Man Sings From the Gut
by Ryan Vaillancourt
Published: Friday, May 7, 2010 4:41 PM PDT
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - The man who calls himself Artwork definitely stands out in a crowd. But it’s not just because he weighs in at about 350 pounds, or because he has one of those megawatt smiles.
It’s more the voice, a baritone so thick and resonant it may as well emanate from the depths of a volcano. And he’s not even plugged in and singing yet.
The voice really gets unleashed when Artwork Jamal, 44, an electric bluesman who prays at the altars of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, straps on his Gibson guitar.
“I’ve always had this voice,” said Jamal, who had his first live gig at a Crenshaw nightclub at age 14 and today lives in the Historic Core. “When I was younger, yeah it was a little bit higher, but it always had that resonance, that timbre.”
Jamal has been playing Downtown Los Angeles venues such as 410 Boyd and Five Star Bar for the past four years, and has a monthly show at Seven Grand. He appears at The Mezz at the Alexandria with his five-piece band — a rotating cast of players often featuring organ player Deacon Jones — on Thursday, May 13, the night of Art Walk.
Before trying to make a living performing, he worked behind the scenes in the music industry. He was a recording engineer on albums by rap artists such as Ice Cube, Tupac and Coolio and R&B singer Montell Jordan. He ran his own studio in Glendale, Graphic Sound Arts, from 1995 until 2000. He folded the shop to take care of his ailing mother and grandmother, both of whom later passed away.
“My grandmother, she gave me her blessing to go and do my own thing full time,” Jamal said. “My heart was always in the blues. I was doing better for myself back then [as an engineer] but the business changed, I got older and I got back to where my heart is, which is playing the blues.”
A Musical Life
As a child, everyone in Jamal’s family was involved in music. His grandfather, who he said played the bugle during World War I, played trumpet for him when he was a boy. As a teenager, Jamal played trumpet himself in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic.
The transition to guitar came later in his teens, when he was listening to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Parliament-Funkadelic. That’s also around the time he ditched the name his mother gave him, Arthur, and started going by Artwork.
“Then I discovered Muddy Waters and it hit my spine, hit me so hard, and I thought this is it for me,” Jamal said.
Jamal’s sets are comprised largely of classic numbers written or popularized by Muddy Waters, B.B. King and other blues giants. He intersperses them with his own songs, many of which are odes to his wife Leda Harris.
People are listening. After a tour in the Bay Area last year, Jamal generated enough attention for the Bay Area Blues Society to name him blues singer of the year.
Ruben Islas, president and CEO of the Amerland Group, which owns the Alexandria Hotel, hires Jamal to play the Mezz once every six weeks or so. They met and became friends when Jamal moved in to Amerland’s Rosslyn Lofts last year.
“I think it’s part of the untapped artistic talent in Downtown L.A. that has not been fostered,” Islas said. “There is an authenticity when he sings the blues. He is the blues. That kind of authenticity is hard to find, and to find a man with a voice like his with a presence like his is a gift for all of us.”
| Sheila E and Artwork Jamal Among Bay Area Music Society Honorees |
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On Sunday March 28th in Oakland, CA, Artwork Jamal was awarded the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame Award For "Male Vocalist of the Year" - presented by the City of Oakland and the Bay Area Blues Society. The Ceremony was held in the Grand Ballroom of the Airport Hilton.
Inducted to the Hall of Fame were blues-rock singer Janis Joplin, drumming and Latin percussion superstar Sheila Escovedo (a.k.a. "Sheila E") and legendary Motown electric bassist James Jamerson. Blues Awards were additionally presented to Zakiya Hooker for Best Blues Recording of 2010, "Big Cat" Tolfried for Bandleader of the Year, and the Lakeside Lounge for Blues Club of the Year.
Artwork Performed two songs at the award show, and closed out the show with a rousing rendition of Muddy Waters' classic "Got My Mojo Workin'."
Mr. Jamal will also be performing later this year at the Monterey Blues Festival, the Temecula Blues Festival, rhe Red, White and Blues Festival, and the Topanga Country Fair.
A blues love story
by Mark McDermott
Published October 8, 2009
There are a lot of blues about women who done somebody wrong – women who left, cheated, poisoned, took all a man’s money away, or all of the above.
Artwork Jamal is singing about the woman who has done him right.
Jamal, an up-and-coming bluesman who plays Starboard Attitude on the Redondo pier Saturday night, has released an album called “Blues for My Lover” that is a remarkably deeply felt document of love, adoration, and joyous funk. Jamal is a big man who possesses a downright enormous voice – a once-in-generation vocal gift, a Barry White or Muddy Waters depth of timbre – and he unleashes it in a series of yowls, howls, growls, and seriously soulful swoons.
But Jamal breaks a bit from blues tradition, not only in the slight infusion of funk and some hard-edged guitar that occasionally veers damned-near into punk territory, but in his sweet disposition and straightforward expressions of love. This is a man who loves women, generally, and loves his woman, Lida, most particularly. He’s singing to tell the world all about it, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.
“She makes it easy,” Jamal said in an interview this week. “Everywhere I perform live, she is right there in the crowd, and I’m singing to her. And it brings me alive, you know.”
“The stories of some of the old blues guys have been really rough,” he added. “I’ve lived the blues life, no doubt. I’ve had my ups and downs and paid my dues. But I’ve also had good women with me, behind me, and by my side… I’m a new generation bluesman.”
Jamal is a classically trained musician who started on trumpet when he was only 6. He studied both trumpet and piano, and at the age of 12 – when his attention began to drift toward rock ’n roll, funk, and soul – picked up the bass. In his teenage years, he also learned guitar, and by his early 20s he was a working musician playing in punk and ska bands all over L.A. He also became a recording engineer and worked in this capacity with artists including Tupac, Brandy, the Temptations, Ice Cube and Aaron Neville.
But eventually he returned to the root of it all. He’d always loved Jimi Hendrix, and when he investigated his influences, he soon found himself deep in the blues. “It all comes from the blues,” Jamal said. “It took me a while to figure this out. … Once I discovered Muddy Waters, there was no turning back.”
Through it all he had the staunch support of his mother, Dr. Elizabeth Harris, who raised him and his brother in a nontraditional nuclear family that also included his grandmother. Jamal recalls how she began his musical education early with a record collection that included Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Bach, the Beatles and the blues. She was also a professional educator who worked her way through a master’s program and to her doctorate while working full-time in the Los Angles Unified School District.
“She was never like, ‘You should get a job.’ She was actually the one buying the basses and amps and whatever I needed from the time I was 6 years old,” Jamal said.
Jamal put his musical career somewhat on hold as he spent 10 years tending both to his grandmother and his mother. He began gigging regularly again when his grandmother passed in 2006, and then last year his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, passed away. He also married the love of his life, Lida, last year. Now he has turned his attention fully back toward music.
Jamal seems poised for a breakthrough on a national stage. He and his band, the Acid Blues, recently won the Santa Clarita Valley International Blues Challenge and will travel to Memphis in January to compete for the overall international crown. But beyond any such honors, Jamal’s prodigious musical gifts and his new take on an age-old genre might answer a question that has long lingered in blues circles: Who will step up among younger bluesmen to replace the great elders who have passed on?
There are plenty of talented blues musicians on the scene. But when you look across blues history, it’s hard to fathom who can mine that deep-down territory that singers like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Big Mama Thornton sang from and about. Jamal has that kind of potential. He has attracted the likes of the legendary Deacon Jones, who plays Hammond B-3 on the new record, and his sound continues to evolve into some new kind of blues. Even when he sings somebody else’s song – say John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” which takes guts to even cover – his take is somehow way more modern.
“That is what I denote the acid blues from – it’s not so traditional,” Jamal said. “What I do is all blues, definitely, but there is a little twist on it.”
And when he sings his own songs, his love comes pouting out. As he sings on “Blues for My Lover”: “Music is my life/And Lida is my wife/And I love her.”
“I have been at this a long time,” Jamal said. “I found a home for me. It’s just about getting it out there and letting it be heard.”
Artwork Jamal and the Acid Blues play Starboard Attitudes at 9 p.m. Oct. 10. Go to artworkjamal.com for more information. ER
SOUTHLAND BLUES JANUARY 2009
Artwork Jamal
“Blues for My Lover”
Graphic Sound Arts
With his deep and gritty baritone voice leading this session of pure blues with lots of bite, Artwork Jamal and The Acid Blues create a mood for all seasons. He shouts, he moans and he tells it like it is with considerable emphasis. Jamal has the kind of authority in his voice that tells you he’s for real. He plays a mean guitar too, and adds Deacon Jones on Hammond organ, Elizabeth Hangan on bass, Eric “Downtown” Brown on saxophone, Michael Fell on harp, Brendan Etter on drums and several guests who add more variety.
Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” and B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues” provide strong ties to the blues tradition while Jamal’s original songs open up new territory for the band. With its fiery guitar push, driving horns and drums, thunderous bass and blazing organ fire, the band puts the acid in its aggressive program. “Lida,” “Candy” and “The Gift,” in particular, come loaded with adrenaline-inducing explosive power.
It’s the strength of Jamal’s voice, however, that maintains the album’s direct attack. He pours it on like a fired-up preacher on Sunday morning when the congregation is in need of a reprimand. Jamal puts his blues message out there with strength and a genuine desire to keep the music in good health.
-Jim Santella
-reprint by permission
A work of art and a Deacon
By John Sollenberger 03/20/2008
An all-star blues act comes to Holly Street Bar & Grill Saturday night as Artwork Jamal and The Acid Blues, with the "Master of the B3 Organ," Deacon Jones, stop in to shake the sawdust.
The band takes listeners on a sonic trip, from the mossy trees of the south to the clubs of Chicago and the sidewalks of Beale Street. The group's influences include greats such as BB King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker,
Bill Withers - all the masters of the genre, with a touch of psychedelia thrown in.
Artwork Jamal boasts a dynamic blues voice - one favorably compared to BB King's and James Cotton's.
Jones is an internationally recognized organ master, known for his flamboyant theatrics and skin-tight technique. He was John Lee Hooker's band leader for 18 years, and is an accomplished composer and arranger.
The sound is augmented by blues harp star Eric "Downtown" Brown and a band of top studio and stage musicians. This is electric blues the way it was meant to be played
-reprint by permission