Joanna Connor isn't your typical blues player.
For one thing, the hard-touring Brooklyn native is a single mother
who's spent years toting her children from gig to gig. (Her son
is 15; her daughter is 4.) For another, Connor's music doesn't
stick strictly to blues paradigms, instead adding elements of
rock and pop to the foundation of Chicago blues she absorbed
while sitting in with the likes of Buddy Guy, James Cotton, and
A.C. Reed in the mid-'80s.
The Joanna Connor Band finds her on a new label, M.C. Records, and playing
more slide than ever before. She's still writing her own music,
but several intriguing covers make their way onto the album,
too, including funked-up versions of Little Willie John's "Fever"
and Grandmaster Flash's seminal rap hit "White Lines,"
as well as an impassioned take on Sam Cooke's "Somebody
Have Mercy." It's also the first time she's recorded under
the Band banner. "I decided to do that because this
was a new sound, a new beginning," she says, "but the
truth is I've always been a very band-oriented performer."
In your liner notes to The
Joanna Connor Band, you say that this time you were finally
allowed to make the music you wanted. Was some of your previous
music not what you wanted it to be?
There were always boundaries to work within.
I wasn't given the freedom to do what I feel. Before, I had "no
funk, no jazz, no this or that." They had their opinions
and ideas, and that's cool, that's their thing, but it was nice
to not have to deal with that this time.
This one's kind of the culmination of everything.
Lyrically and melodically it's a little more advanced, and I
think my guitar playing's better. As a musician, you're always
growing and hoping you get better at what you're doing, and I
think this one's the next step in the progression. I've become
more comfortable with the slide, and people like to hear it;
they're always asking me to play it.
(continue
to part 2)
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