This month completes the 20th year of publication for Sound Waves Magazine. To celebrate this milestone we will be having a party on Friday July 30th at the Knickerbocker Café in Westerly, Rhode Island. Providing the music will be the multi-Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, blues artist, rap artist, movie star, family man and all around nice guy Chris Thomas King.

The first issue of Sound Waves Magazine came out in August of 1990 and featured Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead on the cover. Chris first appeared in the November of 1998 issue when a review of his “Red Mud” album was published. Two years later we reviewed a disc of his called “Me, My Guitar, & the Blues.” After that it really gets interesting.

We’ve been doing an annual “best of the blues” since practically day one. In 2000 “Me, My Guitar, & the Blues” was rated the best blues record of the year. In 2002 we reviewed Chris’s landmark record “Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues” and followed that up with a cover story on Chris in September of 2002. “Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues” was rated the best blues record for 2002. Six years later Chris released a record called “Rise” which dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Chris, a native of New Orleans, lost his home. “Rise” was rated the best blues record of 2006. And finally, just a few months ago, we named Chris as the “blues artist of the decade.”

Those three records certainly weren’t his only accomplishments over the past ten years. Chris became a movie star when he landed the role of Tommy Johnson in the now classic film “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” He also played the part of Lowell Fulson in the movie “Ray.” There were other movies and documentaries as well along with other recordings such as the very electric “Why My Guitar Screams and Moans,” a period piece called “Nawlins Callin’,” and now another brilliant disc called “Stetches of Treme” which is due out this fall. Let’s just say that Chris Thomas King was our first and only choice for our Sound Waves party and we our honored to bring him to the area. This phone interview took place on Wednesday June 2nd.

I just got an advance copy of your new CD “Sketches of Treme” and I think it’s yet another in a long list of great recordings from you. Tell me how this project came about?

CTK – “This record won't be out officially until the fall. But how that project came about is I began writing and recording songs almost two years ago for an album but I didn't have that title in mind. I did a session at a studio in New Orleans called The Shed. We went in there and tracked some songs. I was on a tour. I rededicated myself over the last eighteen months to touring and playing clubs. I grew up in a juke joint. My family owned a juke joint called Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall and my dad ran that club for 25 years and that’s how I really got introduced to the blues. I grew up in that environment. But since my movie, the things that I’ve done as an actor has overshadowed what I felt were my essence as a musical artist. I felt the need to show people that my real essence as an artist is I’m a blues composer, guitarist, and singer. And I want to play in as many places to express that as I can. I had gotten away from playing clubs because I was only playing theaters or flying in for this festival or that festival. And for several years I just didn’t play clubs mostly because of my overhead and management and everything else. It just wasn’t cost effective. The clubs couldn’t afford me and I could afford to perform at them. But I’ve turned a lot of that around and rededicated myself by starting my own booking agency called CTK Tours and that allows me to set my own price and play where I want to play and be more flexible as opposed to being so rigid with a major agency and major management and all that kind of thing.

So I was on tour and we were getting into a really good groove on the road, my musicians and I. And I decided when we got back to New Orleans that I would get us right in to the studio. When I got off the road I had about three or four days before the session and I think in one night I wrote ‘Rehab,’ ‘House of the Rising Son,’ (son not sun) ‘How does it Feel,’ and ‘What the Hell.’ I wrote those songs all in one night. We went into the studio and laid the basic tracks for those songs just a couple of days later. I hadn’t had that kind of flow or that kind of inspiration in a very long time so I was very happy about that. This was last fall around September. So I had done a session and I said we’ll do a new session when I come up with the final four or five numbers that need to go with these tracks. I began my demo process and began experimenting with some tuning on one of my acoustic guitars that I had never really taken out of the case. I lost a lot of guitars during Katrina and some friends let me use a guitar and then never wanted it back. I was given a Gibson LG2 at the Blues and Brews festival in Colorado, the Robert Johnson looking guitar that I’m using on tracks like ‘Sketches of Treme,’ ‘Mind over Matter,’ and I use it on ‘Last go Round.’

I’ve been playing acoustic guitar music and electric guitar music for years and sometimes you feel like you’re in a rut or you just need to break out and try something new, just try some different things to kind of get some inspiration. One of the ways to do that is maybe try some new tuning, new string gages, or whatever. So what I ended up doing is stringing the LG guitar to use it more as like a soprano guitar meaning that my Gibson J45 has a bigger body and has a beautiful fat tone to it as an acoustic guitar. And so I began to look at the guitars like looking at a string quartet. As I started recording and layering different guitars instead of just trying to do the solo bluesman back porch type of thing with the guitar why don’t I take a different approach and create like four guitars but make them all kind of compliment each other to make this one huge sound. And the one way to do that is use that J45 as a baritone guitar and then I restrung the LG2 as like a soprano guitar or a viola, something that is a cut above on the musical staff of the regular strung guitar. What I did to keep that tone was I got rid of all the heavy strings and just only used the E and B strings like the 009 or the 010, the lighter gauged strings that you can use across the whole guitar. The heaviest guitar string, what would normally be your G string it’s up on the top of the neck where the E string would be. So that meant that I can solo on every string of the guitar. All six strings became a solo instrument where as most people just use an acoustic guitar for singer/songwriter but they might play a little delta blues on it. But I wanted to make it a solo instrument and by doing that the contrast from the baritone guitar and the soprano type of sound, this real high pitched guitar sound, it blended great to me and it inspired me and again in one night I wrote about three or four songs. I wrote those songs I just mentioned. I actually wrote more than that. I wrote maybe six or seven tunes at least melodies but I hadn’t flushed out all the lyrics but three of those songs ended up on the record and those are recorded with me playing all the instruments in my studio. My studio moved out of New Orleans after Katrina and now it’s in Prairieville, Louisiana which is maybe 30 minutes north of New Orleans and about 30 minutes south of Baton Rouge.”

You’ve said in the past that you use New Orleans as a muse. Could you expand on that comment?

CTK - “That’s true for the last couple records that I made, for fans that have been following, ever since Katrina happened. My home in New Orleans was flooded. I still own the home and I’m still working to rebuild it believe it or not five years later but that’s a whole other story. So I’ve been out of the city and when you’re out of the city like that when you go back you just appreciate it. You appreciate the uniqueness of the city and the sound and taste. It’s just a city that lives and breathes in a way that most other American cities don’t. But when I was there it’s a muse. I mean it’s a very musical city. It’s just in the water or in the bourbon - take your pick. But since Katrina the last couple of albums that I made, I made an album called ‘Rise’ and just about every song on that album like ‘Baptized in Dirty Water,’ which was nominated for a W.C. Handy Award and ‘What Would Jesus Do,’ the classic ‘St. James Infirmary,’ all those songs were about the aftermath of the disaster. And the next studio album that I did was really an EP called ‘Nawlins Callin’.’

I love that record. It sounded like something that would have come out of New Orleans sixty years ago. Tell me how that one came about?

CTK - “I had been asked to compose some music for a film. It was a film noir and the art direction of it was going to be based on some old comic books from the forties, but it was a timeless film and I was going to be the musical director on the project. And then the project took some twists and turns. I had begun writing but then ended up stepping out of the project and Katrina also played part of a role in that because all of the sudden my life was disrupted and my focus wasn’t really on that or any other thing other than just trying to salvage what I could and take care of my family’s immediate needs. But I had begun thinking about some tracks and writing a couple of things and was going in that direction and then when that project went in a different place I had already gotten myself immersed in music with strings and swinging and trying to find an elegant way to express the blues. I was listening to some Louis Armstrong and I wanted to get my guitar tone to in some way try to emulate or pick up some nuances of how he expressed himself on trumpet. And that’s where my mindset was after I had gotten started. But then I felt that the project was unique and felt my fans aren’t really going to go for this. I mean when you go to most blues clubs people just want you to crank up the guitar and play some roadhouse or rocking blues. But there are some other people that appreciate it. One of the things about that sound and that style of swinging the blues and adding this elegant touch to it meaning that’s what strings tend to do to music along with using some chords that a lot of blues people aren’t playing with. That’s what the blues was in New Orleans before it was separated from jazz. I mean if you really think about the music from turn of the century New Orleans, people have this idea that the blues started with this singular guitar player like a Charley Patton or something. But that’s not the case. It really started in Storyville in New Orleans at least as a formless music when you have several musicians playing together and expressing this music. Along the way the horns got stripped out of the blues as a lead instrument. W.C Handy and Jellyroll Morton would argue about who invented blues or jazz at one point. So the blues and jazz was the same music and those words were interchangeable when describing music. Jazz just meant that it was hot or it was danceable or it had extra energy to it. And blues just meant it was a little bit more melancholy or a ballad or it had some kind of personal lament. But these music’s weren’t separate and that’s one of the other things I would express on this record is that this is what the blues was before people decided to cut it up and separate it into the various parts. Because Jellyroll Morton and W.C. Handy were doing blues before Charley Patton even got in front of a microphone the blues idiom was established. Louis Armstrong was playing on all these records by these great blues female singers before he began to make his own records. So the blues musician and the jazz musician weren’t so separate. But in Mississippi they didn’t have pianos because that was sort of a middle class instrument. To have a piano in your house well first of all you had to have a house not some little shed or shack or something like a lot of people were living in Mississippi. But in New Orleans we had the French influence. A lot of the Creole musicians learned to read music and was taught music by the French and participated in opera and things. So New Orleans was a much more sophisticated city culturally than the rest of the south. And so the uptown musicians were bluesier but the Creole musicians had a lot of access to European culture and reading music and things like that. And so the music in New Orleans just developed a little differently than any other place in the south. I think you going to hear more of me expressing that sound as I continue to embrace New Orleans as a blues musician and that means going all the way back from Louis Armstrong to the current. There’s a lot that I would sing musically in ‘Nawlins Callin’’ and I wanted to release it but I didn’t want to shove it down my fans throats so to speak and put a big spotlight on it like this is Chris’s new direction because it’s not necessarily something I’m going to. You know I put it out there but I don’t even think I released it to retail stores. It was just only digitally released.”

Let’s go back to the “Rise” CD again which dealt with the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. It was a sad record that ended on an optimistic note. But can New Orleans rise up again in the wake of what looks like a much greater tragedy?

CTK - “The oil spill out there and what’s happening with that I can’t make any predictions because there’s nothing to compare it to. We’re in some unknown territory here with this. I hear that people think they’re going to cap it by August but how can they be so sure when nothing else these people have tried has been able to put a dent in it. If anything it’s leaking more than it was when it started.”

What’s so sad is that after the Super Bowl New Orleans was in such a triumphant mood. Now there’s this and you wonder how they can possibly recover.

CTK - “Two things that people should know about Louisiana and about these tragedies is that both of these tragedies were man made tragedies. Neglect by British Petroleum as far as safety and trying to skirt around the rules and trying to find the cheapest way to do things instead of doing things the right way. That’s a man made tragedy in the gulf. And Katrina was a man made tragedy because the levies in New Orleans were built by the government to protect the city but we always say that we’re the greatest country in the world but we don’t seem to be as great as Holland when it comes to building levies. So those are two man made tragedies. I mean storms and things come but New Orleans should be better protected. Now a lot of people say New Orleans will have to go pleading to the government for money and what people around the country or people reading this article should understand is unlike Alaska, where their citizens get money from the oil drilling that goes on up there, New Orleans doesn’t get to keep any of the money that’s drilled out there in the gulf. It all goes to the federal government. The mouth of the Mississippi is not the most profitable port in the United States it’s the second most profitable port in the United States. And the Mississippi was the biggest reason, outside of slavery, that America had to fight the Civil War and get control of that port. If we were getting a royalty or getting any money from what happens in the port of the Mississippi down in New Orleans then New Orleans could have taken care of their own levies and New Orleans would be one of the richest cities in the United States. If it kept any of the pennies of the billions of dollars that is made from it’s off shore oil drilling or if it kept any money that came up the Mississippi River from shipping New Orleans would be one of the richest places in the United States. The money that we’re getting from the federal government is money we sent there in the first place. Alaska gets money from oil and all of their citizen’s profit from it. But New Orleans just has a real bad deal with the federal government as far as resources being totally used by the rest of the country but they don’t have the money to deal with their levies and they should have had some mechanism in place to deal with the tragedy out there in the gulf. And I think people just think that Louisiana is a poor state but it’s not. Almost fifty percent of the seafood consumed in the United States comes out of the gulf. So the country can’t afford to let New Orleans go under. The country cannot really afford to not fix those levies. The country cannot afford not to fix what is happening in the gulf. If America let the gulf end up in ruins, it’s not Louisiana or New Orleans that’s in ruins, that’s a huge reflection on America itself. It means that we’re on the decline if we can’t care of our own. I don’t believe that that’s the case but you’re giving me an opportunity to express myself and I would like to enlighten the readers that New Orleans should be a very wealthy area that shouldn’t have to ask anything from the government. We could be loaning money to the government if we kept the money that we created from the mouth of the Mississippi River and from that off shore drilling.”

“Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues” was such a landmark recording for you. Do you have any immediate plans to return to this style of music?

CTK - “No, it’s not something in my immediate future however this Monday (June 7th) I’ll be performing in Los Angeles with the rapper Common and a few other people for the Monk Institute. I’ve been traveling with him and working with him on a project called from bebop to hip-hop. I show how the blues evolved and show the kids in the school how they can take this music and not only add hip-hop elements to it but they can take it and do whatever they want to do with it in the future because who knows what the future sound is going to be. This music is not some untouchable god-like whatever. It’s not sacrilegious to take the blues and turn it upside down. You got to personalize it and make it your own and express it in the way that you are inspired to do. That music, that foundation that I did, ‘Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues’ wasn’t my first rap/blues album. My first rap/blues album came out in 1994 called ‘21st Century Blues From da ‘Hood.’ And to me this was a landmark album because it set the stage for a lot of things. It still hasn’t gotten the kind of recognition that it deserves but sometimes it takes twenty years for people to understand the impact that a particular piece of art or music had. But a lot of things changed after that record. And a lot of things that have become commonplace have been just kind of accepted as the norm almost. When I go into a club and I do decide to do some hip-hop blues it’s not like security is going to come and drag me out of the place anymore! It’s not like the fire alarms are going to go off or something. It’s still bold music to a lot of people when they hear me do some of these cuts but I’ve been singing that style since 1993 so to me it’s not something new but people might be hearing it for the first time. To them it might be that they’re discovering a new sound or a new approach but for me as an artist I can’t stay stagnant, I just can’t stay there. And so I try to tie these things together using New Orleans and using the trumpet as something that I am kind of drawn to. I mean I’ve played all the licks that I think I want to play from the guitar but Louis Armstrong’s expressiveness on the trumpet and the trumpet in general is mostly what’s identified with New Orleans. And as a guitar player I am trying to take some of those approaches and bring that to the guitar. Like on ‘Nawlins Callin’’ I’m inspired by the earlier period of when blues and jazz were one and you hear me express myself trying to do my best with a Louis Armstrong lick here and there on the guitar. But on my new album when you hear ‘Mind over Matter’ and these things and you hear this soprano-like high pitched guitar, that’s kind of like Miles Davis instead of trying to play for the fat tune on his trumpet, putting in this little thing to give him this real thin high pitched tone. When I use those high strings and tune my guitar the way I have tuned it and play it, I’m getting that high pitched soprano thing like John Coltrane. For example instead of playing ‘My Favorite Things’ on the tenor or on a baritone in fact he chose to use the soprano. And there’s something about that high pitched solo instrument that just soars above everything else and sounds so beautiful. And so that’s where you hear me going with my guitar sounds as far as from ‘Nawlins Callin’’ to ‘Sketches of Treme.’ It’s kind of my muted guitar tone or my soprano guitar, whatever you want to call it. And my four pitch of a guitar quartet is like a mandolin, a high strung tuned Gibson with a smaller body, and then a bigger body J45 is kind of like the baritone or the cello, and then maybe an upright bass or acoustic bass to go under it. That’s what you hear on ‘California Letter’ and some of these other records. You hear that string quartet from the mandolin, the two guitars, and the bass. When you see a lot of singer/songwriters and guitar players play together, a lot of times they got the same gauged strings tuned to the same type of tuning. And there’s just a lot more you can do with those stringed instruments and there is definitely continuity to what I’ve been doing. I feel that ‘Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues’ or more importantly ‘21st Century Blues From da ‘Hood’ is like my ‘Bitches Brew.’ Miles Davis did the cool music, he did bebop, and he obviously did landmark kind of blue modal things and I’m using some modal approaches on ‘Sketches of Treme.’ And then he moved on and did ‘Bitches Brew’ and funk and everything else. I’m not comparing myself to the great Miles Davis but in the spirit of Miles Davis I tend to look forward and not back.”

Do you have any movie projects on the horizon?

CTK - “Like I said I’ve rededicated myself to touring and playing clubs because that’s where a lot of blues fans are. I’ve dedicated myself to do that throughout this year and next year and then I’ll sit down and decide where I’m going. One reason that I’m not doing a lot of acting is that it would sidetrack me from what I’m doing right now. It’s difficult to do both. It’s difficult as an art form but it’s difficult business-wise because the music agent is not making any money when you’re shooting a movie out in Hollywood. And then your Hollywood agent is wondering what you’re doing in Cleveland when you have a chance to audition for this big movie with Will Smith or whatever. You’re not really giving yourself a fair shake musically and you’re not really giving yourself a fair shake as an actor. Other actors, they live and breathe acting. They studied all the greats. This is what they do and this is their whole reason for being. It’s the same thing with music and I just don’t want to half-ass everything. I want to focus right now and see what I can really do musically and I like where I’m at musically. I like the sound of the new record and I like that I found this new modal tuning with the acoustic guitar. It’s very exciting and I’m exploring that. I haven’t been answering the phone or pursuing any acting whatsoever. But, in about a year I’m going to reassess things and I might go in another direction. I might spend a couple of years not touring a whole lot and just playing selected shows so that I can really focus on my acting. But the way I have been going for the last couple of years it’s like I feel like I haven’t been able to really, fully do my best in these two different things. But I am shooting a thing next week with Disney. I do have a recurring character on a kids show called ‘Imagination Movers.’ I shot something last season with them and we’re doing a new segment with them for the new season next week but other than that I haven’t been pursuing anything whatsoever as far as acting goes.”

Finally, why don’t you tell me a little bit about the band you’ll be bringing to the Knickerbocker on July 30th?

CTK - “Well I’m in between bass players but the drummer that I’m working with Jeff Mills is from Hattiesburg Mississippi. He resides in New Orleans as well but he’s a Mississippi guy. Jeff plays drums and he plays the djembe as well. He’s quite the djembe soloist. On songs like ‘Sketches of Treme’ we stretch these things out and we improvise on these songs and they really live and breathe in a live situation. We’re not out there trying to emulate our recording. We think that each performance should be a memorable experience for the audience as well as for ourselves. Even though we have a basic set list we leave a lot of room for improvisation and finding a groove and sometimes we lock into a hypnotic thing that the audience can get caught up in and hopefully it will be a memorable experience for the audience. I’ve had about two or three different bass players over the past year and now I’m working with a couple of different bass players. One of the reasons for that is that when you’re playing with guys out of New Orleans it’s really difficult to get them out of that city. They just don’t like traveling because there are so many gigs there. They play two or three gigs a day in New Orleans and it’s difficult to take them away from that. So I have about two or three different guys that rotate with me and I can’t tell you which one will be there. But the ‘Oh Brother’ stuff is part of our set, the ‘Down from the Mountain’ stuff like ‘John Law Burned down the Liquor Sto’’ which sold nearly a million copies are definitely part of the set. The new album is a big part of what we’re doing on tour right now too. There are even some songs from the movie ‘Ray.’ I play Lowell Fulson in the movie ‘Ray’ and we work in a little bit of that as well. We do a little tribute to Ray Charles and basically we just try to have a good time with it. The bass player will normally be playing upright bass and electric bass. I’ll be playing electric guitar as well as acoustic guitar. And the drummer goes from playing drums to getting on the percussions. Even though we’re a trio there’s some versatility within this trio.”

We’ve had Sound Waves parties before that have been complete and total blowouts but this one has the potential to be the best one yet. We’re talking Westerly, Rhode Island in the middle of the summer at the historic Knickerbocker Café with the incredibly talented Chris Thomas King up on stage. Can it possibly get any better than that? So please dear readers circle July 30th on your calendars because you’re all invited. I’ll see you there!