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Blues in the night . . .
When Marcia Ball's piano gets in the mood indigo, an audience should still expect to shake a leg.
By PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 29, 2001
[Publicity photo]
Marcia Ball
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New Orleans offers many pleasures, including the opportunity to catch Marcia Ball at work in her native habitat. She might be singing and pounding the piano in the thick of a wall-to-wall crowd at Jimmy's nightclub in Carrollton, or dazzling thousands of crawfish-eating dancing fools from a stage at the Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Ball's infectious, heavily rhythmic piano blends righteously with a musical gumbo incorporating R&B, jump blues, soul, ballads and roadhouse rock 'n' roll. The mix gelled famously on 1989's Gatorhythms, her third Rounder album and a source of some of her best tunes, including La Ti Da, The Power of Love,Mobile and a rousing cover of Dr. John's How You Carry On.
Some fans swear by 1985's Hot Tamale Baby, with the Clifton Chenier-penned title track and Ball's own That's Enough of That Stuff; others are partial to 1997's Let Me Play With Your Poodle or 1994's moodier Blue House.
Her approach to singing, she says, was largely influenced by blues/R&B vocalists Etta James and Irma Thomas. The latter collaborated with Ball and Nashville singer Tracy Nelson for the 1998 Grammy-nominated Sing It! album.
"I had seen her when I was 13 years old," Ball says of Thomas. "She was playing a big show in New Orleans. I've been a big fan of hers ever since, particularly since I first started singing rhythm and blues and moved away from rock and country."
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Ball relocated to Austin, Texas, in the late '70s, and though she frequently returns to New Orleans for gigs, her new home has had a profound effect on her work.
"You can't live in a town with Butch Hancock, a town where Walter Hyatt lived, and Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Lucinda Williams, and not have a really high bar set for lyrics, for stories," she says. "I think I do exactly what they do. But because I play the piano, because I write on the piano, that makes everything different: Different chord progressions and different rhythms emerge."
Ball found a welcome home at Rounder Records for 14 years. Last year, though, she switched to Alligator, the Chicago-based haven for contemporary blues artists.
"I have had a very long and pleasant relationship with Rounder and have lots of good friends there. But Bruce (Iglauer, Alligator's head) and I have been friends and colleagues for a long time."
So will her forthcoming CD, Presumed Innocent, take a more bluesy direction?
"Kind of, yeah," she says. "It's kind of a more serious record in concept and in execution. Bruce wanted to have that feeling about it, especially for that first project.
"When I played the whole record for my husband -- I trapped him in the car driving to Houston and made him listen to the whole thing -- he turned to me and said, 'Damn, baby,' like, 'What did I do to make you mad at me this time?'
"But if they (listeners) can't shake a leg, then they're not going to get it. It definitely fits my modus operandi."
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