Gavin B.

Song of the Day
DAY THREE: All Intrumentals Week!


The cover of the Blues Project's sole studio record on Verve.


Flute Thing- The Blues Project The Blues Project was one of the earliest and most revolutionary bands from the New York city underground rock scene of the mid-60s. The Blues Project should have been one of the top tier bands of the 60s but the band fell prey to intramural bickering and self destructed before producing a decent body of work.

The only studio album recorded by the Blues Project was the dazzling Projections, one of the benchmark albums of the 60's pop music renaissance. There was also two live albums of the Blues Project; Live at the Cafe Au Go Go and Live at Town Hall but the production value of the recordings is so amateurish that both live albums are a bit of an embarassment to the band.

There was a good reason why the fidelity of both live Blues Project albums was so awful. Way back in 1966, recording engineers had yet to develop a precise technology for recording live rock bands. Finally in 1971 Atlantic Record's master producer Tom Dowd presided over a near studio quality recording of a three night gig by the Allman Brothers band at the Fillmore East. Dowd's mixing and editing techniques used to record The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East became a producer's how-to manual for recording a live rock band. Unfortunately that was about four years after the break up of the Blues Project.

"The Blues Project" name was a bit misleading because the band played an ecclectic array of music including blues, jazz, rock, soul, folk, psychedelica and even some baroque ballads with a classical influence. In 1966, no other band on the American rock scene had mastery over as many styles of music as the Blues Project.

The band was the first rock band to be signed by the venerable jazz indie label, Verve Records. Through the Verve association the Blues Project developed crossover appeal among jazz and blues fans, as well as the younger audience tuned into music of the flowering rock underground.

The founders of the Blues Project were two Greenwich Village guitarists Danny Kalb and Steve Katz, along with Andy Kulberg who was a classically trained flute player. . The group's drummer, Roy Blumenfeld, was a nuanced and versatile jazz drummer who also possessed an equally proficent apptitude for playing hard rock.

Keyboardist Al Kooper joined the band after hearing the Blues Project's audition for Columbia Records. Kooper was a Columbia Records contract player who played keyboards on the sessions for Bob Dylan's groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited album in 1965. Those bluesy Hammond organ fills at the chorus of the song Like A Rolling Stone were played by Kooper. From my perspective, Kooper's organ playing was a big part of why Like A Rolling Stone is such a memorable Dylan song.

It was pretty clear upon his entry to the band, the brilliant but pedactic Kooper would have a big impact on the creative vision of the Blues Project. Kooper's primary rival for creative control of the group was Kalb, a hellaciously good blues guitarist whose reputation as blues player was second only to that of Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Kooper wanted to add horns to the band and Kalb objected.

Kalb dropped some bad acid trip and disappeared for several weeks, during which Kooper and Katz left the band to form the first edtion of Blood Sweat and Tears. Kooper left Blood Sweat and Tears after recording their brilliant debut album and formed a partnership with ex Butterfield guitarist Mike Bloomfield and recorded two very successful Super Session albums.

With Kooper and Katz gonzo to form BS&T and Kalb suffering from acid damage; Kulberg and Blumenfeld made one final halfhearted more album under the Blues Project banner then formed a second Blues Project splinter group called Seatrain.

Kalb recorded a pretty good album titled Crosscurrents with accoustic guitar wizard Stefan Grossman in 1969 and made a couple of feeble attempts to reform the Blues Project the early 70s. There was a single reuion gig of the original Blues Project in Central Park in 1973 in which Danny Kalb instructed Al Kooper not to make eye contact with him during the gig.

After that gig, Kalb lost his moorings and vanished somewhere in the 70s of life. Kalb returned to the land of the living this year with a critically acclaimed album of accoustic blues called I'm Going to Live the Life I Sing About.

Kooper still produces music and gigs from time to time. Andy Kulberg died of lymphoma in early 2002. The only reason I know about Kulberg's death is his longtime girlfriend was an old and dear friend of mine from Boston. Flute Thing was Andy's song and this video is a great tribute to his talent. BTW Kooper was absent from the filming of this documentary video and it looks like Booker T. Washington of the MGs is filling in for him on Hammond organ.