The Trance Man
Monday April 26th, 1999 @ 8:29 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
The moon breached the black waters of a midnight Mississippi River, as though it rose from their depths. Orange moonlight shimmered across the rolling surface. The great globe peered at me through the giant swamp trees behind the levee, where a few tired volunteers picked up trash from the tens of thousand of blues fans who had occupied the scene only hours before. I puffed an almond-flavored ten-dollar cigar and stared back at the moon, looming disproportionately large, through the whorl of smoke. I smelled barbecued ribs from the many stands on Cherry Street behind me where die-hard vendors still barked at lingering patrons. It was October of 1996 at the famous King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas.
But for the barkers’ occasional cry, it was quiet. A thunderhead of black clouds began to consume the rising moon and soon swallowed it into the swirling darkness. It did not rain, but it cooled the sultry night, and quelled the buzzing insects. Far down the street I heard a muffled base beat from the band playing in the Sonny Boy Williamson museum. I shuffled along in that direction following the music. A long waiting-line gave me cause to continue on following a new sound from a few doors down.
The beat I heard was right “in the pocket” and beckoned me inside. It was an old and abandoned brick-walled hardware store, converted for this week only into a bustling roadhouse befitting the festivities in this famed riverboat town. The owner, Harry Satanstein, hailed from Philadelphia and was enchanted by the history and culture of blues rich: Old Historic Downtown Helena. He also believed in Ghosts.
He told me that he had seen ghosts of dead blues men nodding their approval to him while he labored at the refurbishing of the building–upstairs, in the balcony area where he created his bandstand. He placed paintings of these same blues men all along and high up on the two-story interior and they looked down at me as I remembered his tale of specters and haunting.
The joint was a jumpin’! Lefty’s Arkablue, it was called, named after Harry’s cat. Famous blues stars held court in their different arenas and fans from all over the world mingled among the many musicians, drinking beer and eating barbecue. Smoke was thick, like moving mist in a swamp. It rose in great swirls to be caught above in dim floodlights, red, blue, and green. The pall gave the atmosphere an eerie appearance; a hiding place for Harry’s ghosts to blend within.
The smoke rose constantly upward in marvelous drifting patterns and obscured the visages of the musicians playing in the balcony–that tantalizing beat that now called to me in a vortex of sound. I climbed the steps and emerged in the small upper room looking down on clamoring humankind. I sat down. I looked briefly at the big old bluesman who sat across from me lost in music of his own creation.
I closed my eyes; placed my chin into my hands. Something was happening to me, a rare and beautiful experience: I was being drawn, moth-like, deep into this man’s music. So deep that the crowd below disappeared. All their noise subsided into the recesses of my mind as though someone had closed a door. The music held me in a trance. This man played one riff over and over again through a groove incredibly deep, and perfect. Over time I became aware of subtle changes to the riff which nevertheless pulled at me relentlessly. The man’s songs went on and on. He didn’t care to end them as their purpose was to transfix, to impale, to hypnotize, to mesmerize. His name was Junior Kimbrough, and he died the following year.
Joining Junior was his son, and a monster harp player named Billy Branch. I could see Billy’s gray eyes glancing at Junior through the curtain of smoke that separated us. Branch’s patented mercurial runs had given way to Junior’s trance and his tone became less harsh and more haunting.
Again I closed my eyes and let the aura of the evening absorb me. Then I heard a familiar guitar tone. To a trained ear, good guitarists have distinct tones, like fingerprints. It is easy to discern B.B. King from Albert Collins or Stevie Ray Vaughn. I looked up to see Jason Coomes sitting by Junior Kimbrough, in a respectful posture, playing his Stratocaster. I kept my eyes open and watched. Like everyone else, Jason was caught helplessly in the trance and he complimented Junior’s riffs with soulful licks and chords of his own. I had never heard Jason play quite like that before. That was the effect this trancemaster had on people.
Jason had always been a superb technical player, in the school of Eddie Van Halen, where speed, dexterity, and almost maniacal energy are the chief values. Had Jason wanted to, he could have beaten Junior Kimbrough in any kind of race through scales or arpeggios, after all, he is nicknamed “twelve fingers”. The old man had never been a schooled musician. He just wanted to express the depth of his soul and over the years he’d learned how to do that. He had his own style, his own musical voice. Historically, Delta blues men had little or no education, so their intelligence was expressed through feeling, and the tool of that feeling was their own music.
Something happened to Jason that night behind the symbolic smoky veil where he sat with the trance man. He was never the same again. I’m not declaring that he was galvanized on the spot like he’d been healed by an evangelist, but his approach changed and he began to listen better and started to value the beauty and soul of each note he played. Since that time he has matured into a genuine blues guitarist, able to sublimate his experiences into an increasingly soulful sound. It makes his mercury driven runs stand apart now and gives tease and taste to his performances.
To Jason “Twelve Fingers” Coomes, there remains a ghost in Lefty’s Arkablue, a building that has stood empty ever since that night. No one knows what happened to Harry, it’s erstwhile eccentric owner. Some of the pictures and posters still hang on the wall, but no band has played there since. Whenever we visit Helena, I peek in the windows and conjure up that unusual evening. Where a bent and quiet bluesman from the Delta, without saying a word, passed on his spirit to a young and talented, long-haired, white boy from Wyoming, who now lets that spirit live on in his own music, and therein performs the ghost of Junior Kimbrough, heard through Jason’s guitar. I doubt that Twelve Fingers attributes much of what he is playing these days to that man or that evening, but I was there and observed what happened: a transfusion of soul among two human beings as diverse as God can make them, so that the rest of us can share the magic.
Posted by Carl