Chicago Beau brings the wild Windy City blues to Rich Mix

In a memorable curve ball moment, the pre-concert talk takes place post-gig. Or rather what starts as a set of songs turns into a switched on discussion that catches the audience off guard because of the spontaneity with which vocalist-harmonica player LT Beauchamp, a.k.a. Chicago Beau, instigates it. But the Q&A is compelling given the fact that the blues man, with humour and charisma to burn, is a superlative raconteur who makes it clear that the true spirit of the music is the very act of “sending messages to the people”. It is a language. From the moment that Beau ambles on stage, not so much assisted as enhanced by a walking stick and a shock of white hair escaping from a cap to give him a hint of Don King, he speaks it loud and clear.

With an excellent British band anchored by drummer Cheryl Alleyne and double bassist Miles Danso, the 74 year-old Chicagoan is appearing as part of the Certain Blacks Festival, an annual event whose very name is taken from the seminal 1970 Art Ensemble Of Chicago album on which Beau appeared, so to a large extent he was made to be here. The explosive, freeform energy of that session is not the order of the day, but the intensity, the unfettered wildness of the blues is, especially when Beau launches into the tunes that saw the genre birth a baby called rock. ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, all super-sized braggadocio, mystical black cat bones and fleshy backbeat, packs a punch which guitarist Maurice Brown, organist Paul Weinreb and horn section Trevor Edwards (trombone) and Bukky Leo (tenor sax) compound with well timed muscular licks. And if that Muddy Waters classic sounds anything but dated then Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘Key To The Highway’ is also a song of timeless integrity, presenting any new exponent with gifts aplenty, namely the richness of an original melody that invites concise solos in between lines.

The same could be said of ‘Bring It On Home To Me’, a lyric in which the depth of emotion and direct slant of the lyric combine to create a paradigm that modern R&B and pop would do well to uphold. Beauchamp is able to not so much breathe new life into this material as reveal his own strength of character through it, and as potently as he gels with the band the performance peaks when he plays solo, using his voice and harmonica as call and response, before reading from one of his books.

Indeed, a highlight of the evening is his recitation of a piece called ‘Slut City’, in which he scorches all the misogyny he has witnessed firsthand, turning his disgust at hearing women being disrespected into a well-pitched tirade about the wicked ways of men who should know better. It is a thought provoking, sobering moment that is entirely appropriate given the ongoing, urgent debate on endemic sexual violence. Just a few days earlier in London the BFI screened Nina Menkes’s Brainwashed, a cerebrally sharp documentary on the dim, damaging representation of women in cinema, and although in a different medium the work has a similar premise to Beau’s text. He may not be a theorist or filmmaker but he is a truth teller, for whom playing the blues is the same as talking the blues. Or, to paraphrase what was said over 50 years ago certain blacks do what they got to.