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Ricky Nye's Boogie Woogie piano festival has brought
artists from all over the world to Newport's Southgate
House for the past four years.
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The sounds of Boogie Woogie Blues piano will once again fill the hallowed halls of Newport's Southgate House this weekend. Saturday night, it's time for the fourth annual Blues & Boogie Piano Summit event, which has been organized each year by Ricky Nye, a prominent veteran local musician who currently lights up the local circuit regularly with his New Orleans-styled Blues and R&B groups, The Swingin' Mudbugs, The Red Hots and as a solo performer.
Nye has also traveled extensively in Europe, performing at various festival and club dates, which has led to his ability to book artists from all over the world for his event. But the initial inspiration for the Blues & Boogie Piano Summit grew out of the unique "Arches Boogie Piano Stage" at the annual Queen City Blues Festival. It was there, in 1996, that Nye met British-born Carl Sonny Leyland, onetime pianist for the California-based Western Swing crew Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys. Leyland, along with local legend Big Joe Duskin, helped Nye decide to delve deeper into the rolling, slinky style of playing.
"(Leyland and Duskin) made Boogie Woogie attractive to me -- I didn't grow up on that kind of music," says Nye, who was a member of local Pop/Rock icons The Raisins in '80s, and has since played everything from Country and Funk to Jazz and Zydeco.
When Leyland called Nye to see if he could dig up some local work for him in Cincinnati, the Summit was, somewhat inadvertently, born.
"I didn't plan to do an annual show at all," Nye admits. The first show was put together in about four weeks, on a Tuesday night at the Southgate House. The first show featured Nye, Leyland, Duskin and Renaud Patigny, a Belgian pianist who just happened to e-mail Nye a few weeks before the concert about a possible gig in Cincinnati. Patigny turned out to be the spark that lit Nye's desire to make the Blues & Boogie Piano Summit a regular affair.
"I only decided to make this an annual event after much encouragement from Renaud," says Nye. "He was putting on a series called 'Brosella Boogie Woogie' (in Belgium) four times a year, and had sponsors, beautiful posters, and great venues to hold the concerts -- very impressive! He said to me, 'You can do this too.' So his support -- and harassment -- caused me to dedicate myself to making it bigger and better. I love putting on this show."
Nye says the main intent behind the event is to spread the word about a great American artform, but he admits to "selfish" motives as well. "I get supremely inspired by being in the presence of such greatness," he says.
In the current climate of electric Blues music, it's easy for the classic "barrelhouse"-style of Blues piano that the Summit celebrates to be lost in the shuffle. Though often attached to New Orleans, where it blossomed in modern times, the form -- distinctive for the chugging left hand rhythms and varying right hand figures -- actually sprouted out of the Midwest around the same time as the compatible but fundamentally different Ragtime music. While the first recorded evidence of the music occurred in the 1920s, it's believed that the Boogie Woogie style could have been around as early as the 1880s. In the '20s, artists from Texas to Chicago were working in the genre.
In the '30s, the Tommy Dorsey Band helped popularize the style with an arrangement of the composition "Boogie Woogie," originally written by Chicago pianist Clarence "Pine Top" Smith (who came up with the phrase). The music officially had a name and it went on to be wildly successful in the early '40s, when the "big three" of the genre -- Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson -- enjoyed their biggest success. The basics of Boogie Woogie were key to the playing of Rock & Roll architects like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, while, more recently, New Orleans biggies like Dr. John and Professor Longhair have helped keep the music alive.
Nye says he was a late comer to the music, but, as is evidenced by his passion for the annual concert, he has come to be consumed by Boogie Woogie piano. In his musically formative years, Nye says he wasn't drawn to the music, missing out on Ammons, Lewis and Johnson. It would take Duskin and Leyland to bring him around.
"Whatever I heard when I was young that I understood to be Boogie Woogie sounded really stiff and herky-jerky to me," Nye says. "It certainly didn't sound soulful. But I obviously didn't hear the right people."
Since its humble beginnings, the Blues & Boogie Piano Summit has grown in popularity, thanks to a delegation of organizational duties by the already-too-busy Nye. Nye's brother Ken has been helping out with the general planning of the event, while Amy Joy (formerly the vice-president of the Greater Cincinnati Blues Sociey) has assisted on the publicity end, getting press releases about the event to Blues organizations all over the world.
"The first two years I did everything myself and just about had an aneurysm," Nye jokes, adding that a new feature this year is the nice Baldwin grand pianos provided by Kenwood's Seta Piano. "I've also learned a lot from playing at several Boogie festivals in Europe, and witnessing how they're being operated."
One of those festivals, in Lugano, Switzerland, is where Nye met Silvan Zingg, this year's Swiss representative at the Southgate show. Zingg -- who also played at the Queen City Blues Festival this year -- got into the Boogie Woogie style when he was a young musician, becoming the youngest performer to play at the Lugano Blues Festival at the age of 17. Zingg, now an international festival veteran, has released three CDs, including his most recent enhanced disc, In Concerto, which also features four live video tracks.
Returning favorite Leyland also discovered Boogie piano at a young age, turned on by Dorsey's milestone "Boogie Woogie" as a 15-year-old in the south of England. Leyland has been in America since 1988, exploring a variety of musical styles but always coming back to his original true love. Leyland has appeared on albums by Big Sandy, Deke Dickerson, Dash Rip Rock and Anson Funderburgh, and his music has been featured in films like The Pelican Brief and A Perfect World.
Along with Nye, Zingg and Leyland (all backed by the rhythm section of drummer Tony Franklin and upright bassist Eric Sayer), this year's Summit features Mr. B (aka Mark Braun), an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based player who was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Queen City Blues Festival's Arches Boogie Piano Stage this past summer. Braun, who hosts a like-minded annual "Piano Orgy" in Ann Arbor, has released albums on the legendary Blind Pig Records and is lauded not only for his masterful piano playing but for his deep, soulful vocals as well.
One of the great by-products of Nye's festival is the yearly CD he releases featuring highlights from each event (sadly, the first year wasn't recorded). Nye says he takes input from all of the participating artists when putting the disc together. The recordings usually are released in the Spring following the fest.
"The Summit CDs have been a great cross-promotional tool for all (of the) pianists involved on the shows," he says. "Each pianist gets the whole evening on CD. They then pick the four favorite cuts from their performance and get back to me with their decisions."
Nye plans on continuing the festival as long as possible, insuring that Boogie Woogie piano stays on everyone's radar. The Cincinnati-area might not be the first place you'd imagine for such an event, but Nye says that he's gotten a lot of support and feedback from the local audience and community. And the way the very American music has grown in popularity in Europe is also encouraging for its growth stateside.
"There's no 'Boogie Woogie Society' in Cincinnati, but there are a lot of people around here who like it -- it's fun and it feels good," he says. "As far as its appeal in Europe, where American musical styles have been appreciated and emulated for years, there's a bit more enthusiasm -- people are like, 'Boogie Woogie!' (The festival) is a chance to show something special to the Greater Cincinnati area, and to open new ears to this exciting form of American piano playing."
THE FOURTH ANNUAL BLUES & BOOGIE PIANO SUMMIT takes place Saturday at the Southgate House. For more info, check rickynye.com.
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