Americana veteran Tracy Nelson provides vocals for the collaborative project.
Tracy Nelson is a former Madisonian, now based in Nashville, who went on to build a name with her band, Mother Earth. Corky Siegel is a musician on a mission to bring together different genres, creating something all its own. “Music is music, and my job is to bring cultures together,” says Siegel, a Chicago native known for merging classical with blues. “That’s what music does in general and that’s why music is important in the first place.”
Siegel calls his band Chamber Blues, and on Oct. 11 he’s bringing it to the North Street Cabaret. Nelson will perform vocals with the group, which includes a classical string quartet and an Indian tabla player.
Siegel, who plays blues harmonica and piano, resists the term “crossover music,” choosing instead to let his various musical genre players do their own thing, usually all at the same time.
And he recalls exactly how the whole thing came down.
Siegel is best known as cofounder — with guitarist, former Madison resident, and one-time mayoral candidate Jim Schwall — of the Siegel-Schwall Band, a first-rate blues quartet. The young musicians had played with blues luminaries such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. One night in 1966, Siegel-Schwall was playing at a Chicago club called Big John’s when the idea struck like lightning.
“Jim and I had just finished a set when this guy came up and said he wanted our band to jam with his band,” Siegel remembers.
The “guy” was noted classical conductor Seiji Ozawa and his “band” was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Ozawa, the musical director of the outdoor Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the orchestra, felt that classical music had grown stale and needed rejuvenating. Classical composers like Franz Liszt and Antonín Dvořák often infused their compositions with folk melodies of their day. Ozawa saw the blues as modern-day folk music, Siegel says, and wanted Siegel-Schwall to perform with the symphony.
The radical idea took root, and the collaborators worked with Chicago composer William Russo to create “Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra.” In 1968, Siegel-Schwall and CSO performed the piece at the Ravinia Festival. In 1973, Siegel-Schwall and Ozawa, along with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, recorded Russo’s work for Deutsche Grammophon, one of two times the blues band appeared on the prestigious German classical label.
“Seiji told me that I must pursue this juxtaposition of blues and classical as a way to spark the classical form and bring more people together,” Siegel says. “No one but me has picked up that ball.”
Siegel has since performed with other orchestras, eventually moving to the simpler chamber music format, and started writing classical compositions. The problem was that Siegel couldn’t read music. In fact, he has trouble reading anything at all.
“I have a severe learning disability that I think is dyslexia,” he explains. “I never really graduated from high school. I just stopped going.
“Music and my approach to it has become my language,” Siegel says. “My approach is based not on notes but entirely on expression.”
For Nelson, a two-time Grammy Award nominee who came up through the San Francisco music scene with her band Mother Earth, Chamber Blues is nothing she ever expected to do, but she doesn’t regret a moment of it.
“Whenever I find something I like that’s new and different, I jump right into it,” Nelson says. “Otherwise, I’d be bored shitless.”
