Piece Description

In this hour of The Blues & Beyond, we'll do our own take on the recent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 1970s Blues & Beyond host Jonny Meister was trading records with a couple of guys in East Germany, where Communist rule meant, among so many other things that residents couldn't buy records from the west. Yet the great blues album "Alabama Blues" by J. B. Lenoir was in print in those years only in East Germany, from the government-run Amiga label. From trading with the East German blues fans, Meister got the Lenoir album, and also a couple of East German blues bands' albums. The East German blues artists had a certain idealism and hope for the future. Engerling sang of rebuilding a blues club, and by extension perhaps, Eastern Europe. Stefan Diestelmann celebrated blues history.

Also in store on this show, two train songs -- train-metaphor songs actually -- one sacred, and one kind of earthy. Sacred steel music from Aubrey Ghent is paired with the sexy sound of Lil Johnson who made a good number of records in the 1930s but is virtually unremembered now. Her life is mostly undocumented.

Plus, we have jazz on the flute from Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble, and from Mark Weinstein with Omar Sosa. We'll hear from Mitchell's latest album and one from several years ago, which includes the challenging piece "Bluerise." Weinstein, famed for the "Cuban Roots" album in 1967 on which he played trombone, didn't make any money on that album-- which became a success only after failing to sell. So he reinvented himself as a philosopher and a flute player. We also have Cuban sounds from percussionist Miguel Diaz, known as Angá, playing some Coltrane!

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