Maxx Cabello Jr.
Get an earful at Maxx's MySpace
 
 
The American music flame will never go out as long as young artists such as Maxx Cabello Jr. take the torch and keep it burning. This young, amazing guitarist, soulful vocalist, and prolific songwriter, hails from the streets of the San Francisco Bay area where he is turning heads and bending the ears of the most jaded veteran musicians and music aficionados. Straight out of the South Bay, this quiet-spoken, polite college student turns into a powerful and captivating artist when he begins to play the guitar. We expect his star to be on the rise in the musical sky before long. His shades of music are reminiscent of the most renowned guitarists of our time. In his work are the inspirations of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, but Maxx definitely adds his own artistry, showing only influences by the guitar legends. His hard driving method of playing is accomplished as well as energetic. His singing is clear and strong as he expresses his music with sensitivity and honesty giving him a very recognizable voice. Even though the late, great John Lee Hooker praised this young guitar player's talent, don't expect to hear any traces of Hooker's Delta blues style in Cabello's offerings. This modernist's way of interpreting music is just not one color pattern in the patchwork of many styles.   His eclectic approach captures audiences from young to old, and his shows are consistently packed with diverse and enthusiastic listeners.    

All Photos Courtesy of Gary Eckhart.   
Performed at Whiskey Bones Roadhouse, Rochester, MN 2007.

TO THE MAXX is what Maxx Cabello is all about.   You don’t get cheated with Maxx, he gives you 100% and then some.   That was just the case May 31^st at Whiskey Bones Roadhouse in Rochester, MN.   It was a special night because joining the band for that romp was Jime “Prime Time” Smith, a student of Jimmy Reed.   Special indeed!   That’s not all, this is one of the most solid bands anywhere.  Check this out:  on drums is the versatile W. C. Handy award winner Allen Kirk, keyboards were handled by Mike Shaw.  Mike has one of the finest Blues bars in Minneapolis:  Shaw’s Bar & Grill, home of a Monday night super jam.   And last, but not least, John Lindberg on bass.   John is one of the most sought after bass players in the Twin Cities.   This guy plays with everybody.   A first rate unit for sure.

I knew this was going to be great.   How could it not be?   Maxx Cabello’s home is San Francisco, but his home away from home is Shaw’s.   Maxx will be the first to tell you that.   Maxx plays the kind of music I love.   From the first note, it’s off to the races.   It’s a power slide; the kind that makes the hair stand up on your head (No Drugs Needed).  

On this night, the band emptied the tank.   The dance floor was full all night and everybody was digging it.   During the second set “Prime Time” joined Maxx and the band.   It was “take no prisoners”.   Wherever Maxx left off, Jimi took over and vice-versa.   I couldn’t get enough!   I could have listened to this all night long!   They damn near did play all night, it was near 2:00 a.m. when they quit.    The band ended the night with “Johnny B Goode”.    That one took it over the top.  I walked out of the place in a daze along with everybody else, I’m sure.   Maxx Cabello was great the first time I saw him and he just keeps getting better and better.   WHAT A SHOW – AWESOME!  

Story and photos by Gary Eckhart
Blue Monday

Jimi's mother, Johnnie Mae Dunson, was a true Chicago Blues legends who passed away in 2007.		"No matter what happens in life, you have to keep moving on.  I say that beacuase I know, even in hardship that I'm pressing on to a better life.  If I can make a few people happy with music, then it makes the journey all the more worthwhile" -Johnnie Mae Dunson

 Mother of the blues  

By Howard Reich

 Chicago Tribune, 2005

 Johnnie Mae Dunson wasn't supposed to live past her 14th birthday, let alone turn the blues on its head with her singing and drumming. But she's not one to let `supposed to' get in her way.     She's not nearly as famous as Koko Taylor or Buddy Guy or "Honeyboy" Edwards or any other Chicago blues legend who comes to mind.   But at 84, Johnnie Mae Dunson--still strong of spirit and mighty of voice--knows as much about the blues as anyone in this town.  Even more, perhaps, since she sings a raw, gritty, unadorned, bona fide Chicago blues that makes zero concessions to the commercial aesthetics that long have defined the genre. Listen to Johnnie Mae, as everyone calls her, and you're hearing one of the last true voices of the blues, a sound steeped in the rural South, where she was born, and honed in Chicago, where she migrated in 1943.  Along the way, she wrote songs for everyone from Muddy Waters to Jimmy Reed, emerged as one of the first female blues drummers and survived uncounted nights in rough, rowdy, West Side dives where gentle souls did not enter lightly.

"I would say she's one of the few 'gutbucket' blues women," says Dick Shurman, a Chicago blues scholar, referring to the unvarnished, down-home quality of her art and her temperament.  Adds Jon Weber, a noted Chicago pianist who has accompanied her in concert, "She's a walking history book, a real important person who, unfortunately, has been somewhat neglected."   But when she appears Friday afternoon at the Chicago Blues Festival, Dunson will be stepping into a spotlight she richly has earned.

For practically every step of her life, she has been told that she never would get anywhere, that there was no place for her in music.   "When I first started playing in Chicago, in the '40s, people said ugly things about a woman who plays the blues," Dunson recalls, sitting in her small North Side apartment, its walls adorned with posters culled from a lifetime of performances.  "They said, 'She must not be a woman if she plays the drums,' " Dunson continues. "They'd call me names. If they hit on me and I wouldn't respond, they said I must be a lesbian."   But Dunson was not intimidated for she already had endured more pain than any of her detractors could have imagined, and it may have immunized her from their assaults.The rheumatic fever she contracted at age 2 in Raymond, Ala., left her with a severely weakened heart and a harshly curtailed life. She spent most of 4th and 5th grades in bed and believed she would not live long.
"When I was 10 years old, I heard the doctors tell my mama, `She won't live to be 14 years old,'" remembers Dunson. "So my mama got a group of people to come to our house and they prayed for me.  "And I believe at that time God gifted me with the music I have because He knew I wouldn't be able to do any other kind of work."

Though Dunson had been singing gospel songs for as long as she could remember, she indeed began creating blues tunes around the time of the prayer session, she says.   She modeled her music on the recordings of Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie and Ma Rainey that her mother played constantly on the Victrola.
Defying everyone's predictions, Dunson gained strength as a teenager and taught herself to treat hair, so that she could earn a few dollars. And when some churchwomen from Chicago came to Raymond and heard Dunson sing, they urged her to come north.

Dunson was ready.

"At that time, everyone was saying Johnnie Mae never will be able to do this, Johnnie Mae never will be able to do that, and I wanted to show them that I could," she says.   So she ventured to Chicago, earning a living doing neighbors' hair in the kitchen of her West Side apartment. By 1944 she was singing on Maxwell Street, the famously frenetic outdoor bazaar where generations of blues musicians performed for loose change.   When one of them asked her to play drums, she picked up a pair of sticks and began bashing freely, basing her technique on memories of beating sticks against her mother's tin water buckets back home in Alabama.

From that point forth, Johnnie Mae Dunson anointed herself a blues drummer, working joints up and down West Madison Street and eventually forming her own trio, The Globe Trotters, named for the West Side lounge of the same title.  In that post-World War II era, women drummer-bandleaders were anomalies, to say the least, but Dunson looked and sounded magisterial at the instrument, say those who saw her.

"She could hold her own with anybody--nobody gave Johnnie Mae a hard time," says Charlie Musselwhite, the esteemed blues harmonica virtuoso who lived in Chicago in the 1960s and spent time in Dunson's orbit.  "People just looked at her, and they would think, `This is somebody I'm not going to mess with,'" adds Musselwhite. "She wasn't what you would call a shrinking flower.  "When she sang, it was incredibly powerful. She could really deliver a song."

Better still, she could write one--hundreds, actually.

"She always had these big ledger books with her, filled with page after page of songs," says Musselwhite. "Many times I saw musicians come up to her practically begging her for a song. She was well respected for that."    Indeed, Muddy Waters recorded her "Evil," Jimmy Reed--whose career she helped guide in the last years of his life--took on her "Going Upside Your Head," "If You Want It Done Right," "Life Won't Last Me Long" and many others.

Yet it wasn't until 2000 that Dunson released her first recording under her own name, the aptly named "Big Boss Lady" (Bogfire).   Considering how much music she has played and composed in a career spanning more than 60 years, it hardly seems enough.

How could so much art--such a deep repository of American folk culture--possibly have gone unrecorded?    "In her day, they didn't give females much recognition in the blues," says Dunson's son, Jimi "Prime Time" Smith, a blues artist in his own right.  "So nobody wanted to take a chance on her. If she hadn't gotten that `Big Boss Lady' record together, there wouldn't be anything."

As for Dunson's enormous reservoir of songs, most of her sheet music was destroyed in a house fire many years ago, she says, so they linger in her inner ear, and on the recordings of other musicians who have cut a few of them.   Though she says she received little in the way of royalties because she didn't control most of her copyrights, she insists that she has no regrets.   "I'm glad I did exactly what I did," says Dunson, whose husband, Andy Smith, died in 1991.   "I'm glad that God let me survive the hardships.  "I'm the mother and the grandmother of the blues."