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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
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."
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."