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BluesWax Sittin’ In With

Anne Harris

Aboard the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise

October 26, 2011

By Stacy A. Jeffress

Once you have witnessed Anne Harris play the violin, you aren’t likely to forget the experience any time soon. It’s not just the wondrous music she makes drawing her bow across the strings, it’s also the way the spirit of the music emanates from her physically. She inhabits the music, or maybe the music inhabits her, but it is impossible not to be drawn under her spell. BluesWax wanted to find out what inspires this energetic and mesmerizing performer, who joined Otis Taylor for his performances aboard the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise in October, 2011, so we sat down for a chat on the ship.

Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: I first saw you at the Blues Music Awards in 2009 when you played with Otis Taylor. You captured my attention then. I have heard so much buzz after your first show on this cruise, so I went last night. They booked you in tiny venues.

Anne Harris: I’m just happy to have a job. I will play on a postage stamp if that’s the real estate I have. I truly am so grateful for any second I get to be in the presence of musicians that I have such tremendous respect for. There’s something so special about Otis’s sound. I’m not a purist; I’m just kind of this mutt. I’m a real hybrid of influences and I don’t come from a particular school of one genre. I’m a cross pollinator. In Otis, his music feeds that. He likes to find the misfits, the oddballs, the square pegs, and somehow throw everyone in the same pot and make a delicious stew of something that’s just his sound. It’s not an easy thing to do, yet he does it.

BW: I wondered how much of the sound you achieve as unit is serendipitous and how much is due to strategy and planning.

AH: There is absolutely no strategy. Otis is an artist who’s purely instinctual. He goes by his gut. When we first met, it was about three years ago. I played at an opening party for the blues fest in Chicago with my band which is a folk-rock/indie-rock kind of thing. I was asked to play a couple of songs at Buddy Guy’s, and we got up and did them. Before the set even started, I’ll never forget meeting Mr. Taylor. I was up in the green room – it was the old Buddy Guy’s before he moved to the new location. In walks this eight-foot, giant man with a grizzly beard and piercing blue eyes. He looks at me and my band and says, “You play that thing?” “Yeah, a little bit.” “You playing later? I’m going to stay and see you.”

I realized it’s the most surrealistic moment, because he’s standing in front of a bigger-than-life-sized photograph of himself Buddy had on the wall in the green room for years. It couldn’t have been scripted better in a movie. I’m looking at the real Otis standing in front of his own larger-than-life beautiful portrait.

So I did my set and afterward he said, “Hey, I’m doing a couple of things here this week. You want to sit in with me?” I hadn’t heard his music, and I’m not a person that will just sit in with anybody. I’m not going to disrespect anything. I want to lift the energy and vibration of whatever I’m contributing to, and if I can’t do that, I’m just going to sit down and be quiet. If something is just perfect, I’m not going to jump on it because someone asked me to play. Or, if it’s not something that I can do anything with that will make it better or enhance the experience. So I’d already kind of written it off. I’m not a straight-ahead blues player, and he’s probably looking for straight ahead blues. And he just saw me play; I can’t believe he’s even asking me to sit in. He gave me a CD.

BW: Which CD was it?

AH: Recapturing the Banjo. I put the CD in on my way home from the club, and from the opening, my jaw was on the floor. I got goose bumps. I was completely riveted by the sound. I heard a real sonic space in it. I’ve been a real fan of African music for quite awhile, and specifically music from Mali. For whatever reason that country has a resonation with me; the sounds that come out of it. When I heard Otis’s music, I heard Mali straight up. And the folk thing which really worked for me. And I heard the rock thing, the psychedelic thing.

BW: That “Hey Joe” yesterday was like psychedelia revisited. It was fabulous.

AH: I was raised in a hippie town, and that’s my culture. I was thrilled when I heard that CD. I could just swim in this music. The next day Otis did a radio promo on WXRT with Tom Marker who is a huge supporter of the blues. He does a blues show every week on one of the biggest rock stations in the country. He has been instrumental in using that format to broadcast the blues to a lot of people that wouldn’t normally hear it. He’s been an important part of my blues education.

BW: Was Otis at Buddy Guy’s to see you intentionally?

AH: No, he was there for the opening party of the blues festival, because there were a bunch of different bands playing. Everyone playing the festival was invited to come down.

So I listened to that radio show the next day, because I heard the record but had never seen him live. He didn’t tell me what his line-up was. At that time it was Jonn Del Toro Richardson on guitar and Cassie [Taylor] on bass as a trio. No percussion player, no drummer. So I listened to every note I could. The next day is the day I’m supposed to do this. He says, “You come up and play, it might just be a song, or I might ask you to stay a little longer.” He doesn’t have a set list: he doesn’t have this song is in this key. We played the first tune, then I was getting ready to leave and was picking up my stuff. He said, “No, you can stay a little bit.” I stayed for the next song and thought, “Surely I’m going to leave now.”

I ended up staying for the whole set, so after the set I’m thinking, “Now it’s time to leave. I don’t want to overstay my welcome.” He was letting me play without telling me what to play. I didn’t have a gauge for whether he was digging it except I hadn’t been kicked off stage yet. I started to leave and he asked if I wanted to stick around for the next set, and I ended up playing the weekend. It was one of the most exciting introductions to anyone.

The rest is history. He called, “I like your sound; you’ve got a great tone. I tour a lot; how much can you go on the road?” I’m really grateful. I don’t know how he saw or heard in me some kind of potential for something that would be supportive of his music. I’m so honored that I what I was feeling, hearing, and expressing did proper respect to his vision. That’s what you want to do as an artist; when you play with anyone, you want to make their sound – you just want to hold it up, lift it, and put glitter all around it. That began my journey in this whole other genre I wasn’t steeped in.

BW: What’s your musical educational background?

AH: I studied violin classically for ten years, and then I gave it up, because I wasn’t a classical musician. I love classical music, but it’s not my soul music. I’ve always loved a real eclectic mix of music. Classical training was beautiful because it gave me a foundation, a technique. But I didn’t really learn how to play music until I put down the sheet music and allowed myself to just play.

BW: Was violin your first instrument?

AH: Yes.

BW: Why were you drawn to that?

AH: When I was three my mother took me to see Fiddler on the Roof, and I saw the opening sequence where Isaac Stern was in silhouette on the rooftop playing the beginning to the overture. She said I pointed at the screen and said, “Mommy, that’s what I want to do.” I don’t remember it. I kept bugging her, then a couple years later I did a summer music camp with violin and loved it. I was eight when I started formal training.

I am so blessed by my parents. They have an eclectic, amazing music collection. There was always music around of all different kinds. Classical, jazz, gospel, musical theatre, pop, you name it. As a kid they would play stuff, and I started listening to R&B and funk and soul. I was down with P-Funk, Parliament-Funkadelic, Cameo. I also loved rock stuff – Led Zeppelin. Then every once in awhile, I’d be looking through my dad’s albums and find something. I don’t know how old I was when I found Innervision by Stevie Wonder. Everyone has their Stevie Wonder moment.

BW: Mine was Songs in the Key of Life.

AH: What can you say about Songs in the Key of Life? For me it was something about the timing, and this was way past when it was actually released, but it opened my head up. It exploded my heart. I would play it over and over and over. That was my gateway drug into hearing that there really are no limits; that all things all possible in pop music. By that, I just mean, music for the people, popular music.

BW: What part of the country did you grow up in?

AH: I was born and raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It’s a little college town in southwestern Ohio, Antioch College. My parents still live there. My mom was the head librarian and my dad worked at the Air Force base, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton.

BW: Any other musically-inclined members of your family?

AH: My sister played the viola and guitar but she’s real brilliant so she could never become a real musician. [laughing] She teaches criminal law at Boalt Hall. She was the first black professor ever to be tenured out there in Berkeley. She’s written a bunch of books – she’s famous. It’s funny, I was at some performance, and I get to talking with this woman. She finds out who my sister is, Angela Harris, and she’s like, “You’re Angela Harris’s sister! She’s my idol!” So my sister’s a rock star in law. My brother’s in New York and works for Suisse Bank.

BW: Three successful kids. Your parents were a great springboard.

AH: My parents are awesome. As I’m a mother myself, that gratitude expands exponentially every day.

BW: How old are your kids?

AH: One daughter; she is five and a half.

BW: That makes life on the road even harder.

AH: My husband works at home. We’re a very close family. Here’s the way I look at it. I have a very dear friend who’s an amazing vocalist. She plays viola and has two girls who are grown now. When I had first had my baby, we were on a session together and were talking about motherhood, womanhood, and about the journey of our careers as artists. And I was finishing up a record, a self-produced thing. She said, “Anne, you know what? That is so fantastic that you are giving your daughter this.” I was feeling a little guilty about time away at the studio, and I’m pumping breast milk and trying to be everywhere at once.

She said, “For you to share what moves your spirit and what can help other people is the biggest gift you can give her.” I hadn’t really looked at it that way; I was looking at it from the stance of being away from her: I should be there every second. But at the same time, there’s always a bigger picture.

The gifts that we give our children; the legacy we leave them is the journey of our lives and how we consciously approach that and how we follow our hearts. Did you follow your truth and your heart and your personal vision to its fullest? Did you sacrifice all the B.S. to give your hundred percent to every moment of passion that you can draw to you and commit to that? I hope that by doing so, she’ll be a woman who will do the same thing with whatever path she chooses.

Stacy Jeffress is a contributing editor at BluesWax.