From the Heart

Mark Hummel is a blues insider

by Mark Edmonds

Although blues music has enjoyed 10 years' worth of unparalleled popularity in middle America, its celebrity has given rise to a downside. It seems as though just about everyone has his line in the water, fishing for success as a blues player. Hopefuls crowd the mail with tapes and discs, the Net with their web sites, and fanzines with ads. Indie labels release dozens of discs a year too, while the majors, not to be left out, have entered the fray with their own offerings.

It's virtually impossible to keep up. Even if you do, it's easy to miss a guy like Mark Hummel, the Connecticut-born, San Francisco-based harp player who plays Gilrein's next Thursday with his Blues Survivors band. A relative unknown here, the 42-year-old Hummel got into the blues because he felt a deep spiritual bond with the music when he first began listening to it as a teen -- he wasn't trying to duck working a day job.

"I think I picked the blues because I felt like an outcast," he explains by phone from a Chicago tour stop. "You know, it's black music that we're playing. That's the first thing that everybody acknowledges. But the feeling of the blues is that of being an outsider, whether it's racial or a status or class thing. That's the essential thing, I think. Most people feel at some point that they're outside of the norm. I know I did."

Hummel worked his way up from Bay Area bar fixture to a national tour-circuit regular. Surviving 25 years of near poverty, hazardous traveling, and a failed marriage, he still speaks of his work with the enthusiasm of someone just starting out.

"I really never got into this because I thought I was going to be a star or anything," he says. "I mean, I've made a living out of doing this since I was 18, but I've never played for any other reason than because I loved the sound of the music. If I made money, great, but it was always about playing."

Hummel was born in New Haven but was raised beneath the smoggy skies of LA. Like many '60s kids, he was led to postwar blues by rock and roll. The Chicago/Chess Records sound of Muddy Waters and two of his harp-blowin' sidemen -- Little Walter Jacobs and James Cotton -- were particular favorites. Studying their sounds on records, Hummel slowly taught himself the basics of blues harmonica playing. After his family relocated again (this time to Berkeley), he knew he had mastered the rudiments of style and phrasing to comfortably hold his own in public. Joining jam sessions with other transplanted blowers such as Sonny Lane and Mississippi Johnny Waters, he was encouraged to continue after the older players accepted him. Several years later, at age 25, he formed the first incarnation of the Blues Survivors. Twelve years of touring North America and Europe followed, along with a number of personnel changes amid the half-dozen records and discs he and the band waxed for a string of small labels.

Heart, his latest, appears to be his best yet. Produced by Windy City guitar phenom Steve Freund, it features a cast of sidemen, including Dave Myers (the last surviving member of Little Walter's Aces) and longtime Muddy Waters Band drummer Willie Smith. Although covers comprise a majority of the disc's offerings, they're done well enough to keep those of us who've heard familiar Little Walter's, John Lee "Sonny Boy #1" Williamson's, Tampa Red's, Roosevelt Sykes's, and Albert Collins's songs interested.

Jacob's "My Kind of Baby" appears with the same fat-backed double-time rhythm that graced all of his Chess singles, while Williamson's "Step Back Baby," Sykes's "Out on a Limb," and Red's "I Forgive You" are as melancholy and playful as each's lyrics require. Collins's "Love Shock" delivers the same sultry sound that distinguished many of the late Texan's early-'60s sides from his Lone Star and Chicago blues brethren.

To each of the songs, Hummel adds his own twist -- an instrument that wasn't on the master or a different harp line -- individualizing them. In the end, nothing on Heart comes through as note for note.

"I guess that one thing I've realized after 25 years is that no matter how much you try to sound like somebody else, you always end up sounding like yourself after a certain period of time," he says. "I think what you have to do is mash everyone's style together to get your own. If you only focus on one thing, you're in trouble. And what I also tried to do with this project, as I do on-stage, was pick songs that were obscure enough to not be boring, too. By now, everybody's heard enough of "Got My Mojo Working."

Mark Hummel and the Blues Survivors play Gilrein's at 9 p.m. on October 30. Tickets are $6. Call 791-2583.