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| Adam Gussow's new book - Journeyman's Road At the heart of author Adam Gussow's new book, Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York is his own unlikely and remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling Magee, a.k.a. Mister Satan. Their musical collaboration is marked not just by a series of polarities—black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship—but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds. This Satan and Adam collaboration serves as the backdrop to Journeyman's Road, which tells unfamiliar stories about a popular American art form, the blues. In the process, the book takes contrarian positions, explodes familiar mythologies, and frames the contemporary blues scene in bold new ways. Taking its title from Gussow's self-described status as a "journeyman", —a musician who has completed his apprenticeship and is well on his way to becoming a master—Journeyman's Road brings together articles that Gussow wrote for publications such as Blues Access and Harper's, as well as critical essays, including the first comprehensive examination of William Faulkner's relationship with the blues. Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York's mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics. At once elegiac and forward-looking, Journeyman's Road offers a collective portrait of a New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9/11 and healing itself with the blues. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Jazz News :: home page |