Kool-Aide waits for his band to heat up before picking out a lead with the three good fingers on his left hand. He lost the other two eight years ago in the auto shop where he works, and it took him three years to reconfigure his parts to play again. He is sitting with a friend at a back table in Club Paradox. It is a Sunday night, but a healthy crowd is gathering in the small, homey club at 3rd and Quindaro. Heads turn when his precise, gorgeous lead notes ring out of nowhere. A fine looking man with a white hat on, a black shirt and creased white pants, he is smiling up at the front of the room as his lead begins to build on itself, shaping the music around itself. With easy grace, he stands up from the table and strolls to the front of the room, takes the mic and asks, “Are you feeling good, tonight?” before launching into a rocking blues shuffle.

Earlier that night, I was sitting alone at home, as broken hearted as I've ever been in my life, when five hard knocks came at my door. It was my old friend, Scott Mackey, one of the city’s most dedicated club crawlers and, despite having a full-time job that would consume most people’s lives, one of the city’s most remarkable blues promoters in his spare time. I tend to be wracked with guilt when I see him because he’s been promoting blues shows at his mother’s bar, Club 403 (just about six blocks from my home) for well over a year now, and I have yet to hit one. Back when I first moved to Kansas City in the late eighties, it was Scott who first introduced me to such local blues greats as Millage Gilbert, Abb Locke and Leon Estelle, and it was Scott who first took me to Grace’s After Hours blues jam off 13th and State, some of the finest music ever in this city played straight through until dawn. Marriage, fatherhood, tight finances, overcommitment and laziness separated me from the great things Scott had to show me over the last ten years, but on this particular night, his arrival was like that of an angel from heaven.

He came in and sat on my couch. “I wanna take you down to Club Paradox; you’ve got to see this guitarist, Kool Aide.”

I was slow to see my opportunity. I said I didn’t have much money; he said he’d front me the money. I said I had a lot of work to do; he said we didn’t have to stay too long. Now, I knew damn well in the self-pitying mood I was in Iwasn’t going to get any work done, so I quit making excuses, and I went.

Scott Mackey and I were, I believe, the only white folks in Club Paradox that night, but the atmosphere couldn’t have been more inviting. First of all, Scott’s such a tireless advocate of blues, particularly in oft-neglected KCK, that everyone knows him, and he was able to introduce me to most of the folks in the club right after initial hugs and warm handshakes. It turned out I didn’t need my money. Scott picked up my first drink and Kool Aide’s fill-in rhythm guitarist (who also fronts his own band), Kelsey Hill covered my second. I met so many fine people that night, many with plans for blues shows and benefits, that I was kicking myself for not bringing a pad and paper.

But what I remember about that night has remained vivid for two weeks now, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to write another column until I got this experience out of my system. The band had started early, 7:00, but they played several sets, until a little after 11:00. The music was spectacular. All three guitarists (including the bass) had wireless instruments and strolled around the room at various points in the evening, adding to the excitement of each particularly hot jam. During one such stroll, drummer Ricky Hardy literally started boiling with fills, taking the excitement through the roof. Bassist Adam Page was equally dynamic on his instrument and took over lead vocals when Kool Aide would take breaks. Guitarist Kelsey Hill played a colorful, impossibly textured rhythm that built new spaces in the songs.

The set was generally down home Kansas City blues, with staples like B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” expected and necessary. But a Kool Aide original, such as “Hard-Headed Woman,” fit in seamlessly with the classics, and his reworkings of Tyrone Davis’s “Give It Up/Turn It Loose” and Bobby Bland’s “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time” were fresh and invigorating. At one point, the lead barmaid pulled me up onto the floor like an old friend, with the words, “Now, you’re going to dance, Danny.” And the good cheer in the room was so strong that my spirits carried me through the jam without a care in the world, although we were dancing alone in front of the whole room. The night ended on a particularly exuberant high note with a cover of the Commodore’s “Brick House.”

Now, my own blues crept back that night by the time I got home, but I had learned a little lesson, and Friday night, I went out prowling on my own to see what else was up in my neighborhood. I didn’t have to look far.

The very first club I walked into was Mississipi Grace’s at 731 Minnesota. The band that was playing there was the Bill Carter Blues Review and Show Band. In that first set, I was entranced watching Carter, a slight man with a powerful presence, play fine blues leads and sing heartfelt standards. He, too, played “The Thrill Is Gone,” but it had his own fingerprints. Carter sang with a reedy, plaintive voice that owed nothing to B.B. King and made the song entirely his own.

After Carter’s set, the four-piece backing band regrouped with two additional singers out front. This reconfiguration of the band was called “Dimensions of Love,” and it actually featured three singers, keyboardist Wayne Russell, Wayne “Fat Daddy” Green and Jesse “Skip” Williams. Dimensions of Love performed a wonderful soul set, easily moving from covers of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” (with Russell singing lead) to the Temptations “Heavenly” to Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” Green and Williams danced out front with the casual flair of two Stylistics. The songs were executed passionately and precisely, and the house was joyful.

I was struck by how all three vocalists would sing tenor at times, take the middle vocal at other times, and Green could move from falsetto to baritone. Green explained to me that all three of them are actually tenors but each singer has his own feel for each song. “Russell goes the highest,” he noted, “with this note he hits at the end of ‘(Ain’t It Funny) How Time Slips Away’.” I missed that number that night as well as another I will catch at my first opportunity, Williams singing lead on Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”

Both nights I was impressed by how much history was in each band (Bill Carter’s drummer Dusty Henderson notably reminisced about playing with many of the greats in the days when the east side of KCMO was filled with blues clubs for miles down Highway 71). But I was even more struck with how contemporary the music sounded. Commenting on his hi-tech mixing board and wireless instruments, Kelsey Hill argued, “A lot of these young blues performers think you have to use old gear to keep it real, but if Muddy or Jimi were playing today, they’d be using the best things out there.”

The stereotype of the blues musician is that of a traditionalist, but all of these performers played with the moment in mind, an ear to contemporary trends and utter disregard for the artificial divisions both individual purists and the music industry as a whole like to place on music. Playing to working class and lower income audiences well outside of the spotlight of the college and yuppie-oriented Kansas City scene, these blues musicians prove all night long, over and over again, that while everyone dreams of making it, the blues (as is all music at its heart) is an essential key to the survival of both artist and audience.

“Don’t be afraid of the blues, it defines who you are,” Queen Bey stated in the Kansas City-produced movie Ninth Street. Craig Werner wrote in his essential book A Change Is Gonna Come, “Singing the blues doesn’t reaffirm the brutal experience [though that’s generally what it deals with], it reaffirms the value of life. The blues don’t even pretend you’re going to escape the cycle. You sing the blues so you can live to sing the blues again. A lot of times the blues are mostly about finding the energy to keep moving.” That’s what Scott Mackey, Kool Aide, Kelsey Hill, Adam Page, Ricky Hardy, Bill Carter, Johnny Baynham, Wayne Russell, Glen Thurman, Dusty Henderson, Wayne Green and Jesse Williams did for me on those two nights, and I’m writing this column because of that,and I’m writing this column to thank them. In a just world, they would be roundly celebrated for their heroism; in this world their music is a promise that such a world could someday exist.

The Bill Carter Blues Review & Show Band can be heard at Club Mardis Gras (1600 E. 19th) on June 23rd and at Mississipi Grace’s (731 Minnesota) on July 8.

Kool Aid plays every first Sunday of the month at Club Paradox (2006 N. 3rd, KCK), 7-11 p.m. and every fourth Sunday at Park Place Hotel (I-435 and Front Street).

--Danny Alexander
danny@thezone.org