When in doubt, blame Dad. Eric Bibb is now on the brink of climbing out of blues cultdom to a wider audience - because of his father's active involvement in the Greenwich Village folk movement of the 1960s. This particular baby Bibb, having been exposed to a great wealth of American folk music - from blues to gospel to bluegrass, from Reverend Gary Davis to Pete Seeger, from Judy Collins to Richie Havens, from Joni Mitchell to Tom Paxton - was raised amidst the Who's Who of the folk music revival.
At 11 years of age, Eric met Bob Dylan at a house party: "When I found out that he had arrived I snuck downstairs in my pyjamas and had a talk with him about guitar playing. He told me to keep it simple - forget all the fancy shit." At 14, young Bibb entered New York's High School for Performing Arts. The "Fame" faculty exposed him to a wide range of musics, including classical, as well as a thorough grounding in musical theory and composition. His experiences there brought him on an inter-cultural musical journey he hasn't yet completed. On his journey, however, Eric made a connection that not many pop musicologists appear to have considered: the link between French impressionist composers (Ravel, Debussy, Faure, Satie) and the blues.
"Regardless of how you experience it, emotionally or whatever, on musical terms - scales, modalities - there is a direct connection between the intervals that were favoured by people such as Faure, Ravel, and Debussy," he contends. "If you listen to those and the best of Malian, Gambian or Senegalese kora music, you'll hear what I mean. It's putting cross chords together, getting a lush, romantic feeling. If you listen to that music, you'll also hear something of Mississippi John Hurt, a finger-picker from the Delta."
Bibb politely dismisses the suggestion that someone such as Mississippi John Hurt might not have been familiar with the classical composers he has mentioned. "Those musicians who we tend to think of as rural, traditional, or purist were actually exposed to a much greater variety of music than we would know of. Their repertoires were often much wider than those that were recorded. It was often marketing strategies that limited their outputs to more blues-oriented songs."
Following graduation in the early 1970s, Bibb left New York for Paris. There he struggled as a musician, playing in various situations that were educational if not financially rewarding. Divisive politics and what Eric refers to as "tribal strife" added to his decision to leave his home. Feeling that America as a country needed to re-evaluate its politics and its culture, he was only too glad to move to another country. Saved by his student status from going to Vietnam ("a move I would not have made, and would have done whatever I needed to do in that situation") it wasn't until Bibb left the States that he could put his country's particular brand of friction into a larger perspective.
"What I see when I look around the world is basically local versions of the same type of frictions between groups, whether they're black or white, whatever religion, Middle East or Northern Ireland - it's basically brother against brother, when it comes down to it." Bibb feels these frictions keenly. "I couldn't feel any other way. My background is associated with the folk music circles of the 1960s - pacifist and leftist philosophies were those I was raised on."
After Paris, he travelled to Sweden. With the exception of five years back in New York ("even the folkies were stepping over each other to make it - that really turned me off") Bibb has lived in Stockholm ever since. He found the attitude to racial differences somewhat more engaging.
"Moving to Sweden had a racial edge to it," he says, "but in a very new way. For one thing the situation has definitely changed through the decades. When I first went there, there were very few coloured people around, and instead of the usual second-class citizen mild-to-gross hostility directed towards me, I found, if anything, a benign curiosity. At that time, I guess I was somewhat of an exotic entity. "What I also found was a refreshing open-mindedness and political tolerance that no longer, unfortunately, is the first thing you think of when you think of modern-day Sweden. A lot of that open-ness has waned, and emigration has irritated certain social problems and made a backlash inevitable. But at this point, there are also many brown Swedes, as it were; so it's an interesting situation."
Bibb's gradual rise to international prominence has been in tandem with the resurgence of interest in acoustic blues music. Like his contemporaries Keb Mo', Corey Harris and Ben Harper, he blends his accomplished soul-infused blues with a mellow and seductive contemporary sensibility. It's honest music designed for those who have no time for cynicism.
"In private I would make you aware that I am not naive about the music business. There's a lot of baloney in there, and a lot of disproportionate wealth. All of that aside, my motivation for making music is what it's always been: an organic love of the actual music. It's a love of the people who have become my heroes, the people I'm constantly meeting who seem to vibrate to the same type of music that I do. It's definitely much more joy than struggle and pain, especially at this point in my career."
Curiously, Eric Bibb is a bluesman who doesn't equate blues music with abject melancholia. That definition, he claims, is an outsider's view of the music. "As a musician who really has come to know the language of the blues, it's a never ending in-depth study - the people are fascinating, the culture is bottomless. "The dominant emotion, when the blues was coming into being, had to be a reflection of the hardest edges, of which there were a lot. But it's not the whole story. This is music that people used to dance to when they were trying to leave all of their misery and exploitation behind, just trying to get off on the music on a Saturday night. It's juke music, it's raving it up, it's prayerful music, it's melancholy, it's soulful to the extreme. It's also entertainment."
But is not the common perception of the blues that it is melancholy music, written and performed to make doleful people feel better? "It's not so much me wanting to shatter a popular conception or misconception," says Eric. "I don't have a mission as such - but I do feel bound to be honest in my own personal rendering of the blues and my take on it. It has to reflect one's experience. I'm not a melancholy person by nature. My experience isn't dominated by misery and exploitation. It's a more joyful experience I want to convey and express. "I also want to point out that the very miserable slant on life as expressed in blues music that has virtually taken over as a definition is, I intuitively feel, as much the product of the way it was marketed by people who had it in their vested interest to see the performers, these black musicians, as unidimensional, pitiable persons. Unfortunately, a lot of our perceptions about what we're hearing is one group's take on what they're selling. They package it, give it a slant, and it sticks. You then have a popular image that's repeated over and over, even pre-television. And it's effective. Very."
To the detriment of the music? "Yes, but the truth must out."
