He died, just saw it posted in F,B...Rest in Peace

BBC:

British blues musician John Mayall - whose influential band the Bluesbreakers was a springboard for stars including Eric Clapton - has died at the age of 90.

The songwriter died at his home in California on Monday surrounded by his family.
Sir Mick Jagger led the tributes from fellow musicians, with the Rolling Stones frontman hailing him as "a great pioneer of British blues".

"No dope smoking no beer sold after 12 o'clock"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2024-07-24 19:24 by bv.

Saw this coming. Was at his 3rd to last show at Venice West 2022 and it was a sad sight even before he collapsed on stage.

Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, Hard Road with Peter Green and Blues From Laurel Canyon with Mick Taylor are essential. Respect!

Very sad news. The below from Vanity Fair:

Blues Legend John Mayall Is Dead at 90

A giant of the great British blues boom of the 1960s was a musical change-agent who revered and honored his forebears.

“Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller... all the blind guys.” That’s how the multi-instrumentalist John Mayall, one of the chief architects of the British blues revival of the 1960s, who died at 90 yesterday at his home in California, described the influences that shaped his musical tastes and inspired a career that stretched across six decades. That career, which started well before Mayall formed his famous Bluesbreakers in 1963, was not defined by blindness so much as by a single-minded, near-messianic vision that the music created by Black artists of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago’s South Side possessed beauty, honesty, and strength that transcended race, age, and geography. And so, thanks to Mayall—along with the like-minded musician Alexis Korner and a growing number of aficionados—American blues took root in London’s coffee bars, the domain of trad jazz. From there it migrated to subterranean clubs packed with sweaty youths, and on to record players and radios in bedsitter flats from Bournemouth to Belfast.

Soon, a generation had its mojo working as the British R&B scene exploded: the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Them, and much of what came after, including Cream and Fleetwood Mac, two epochal rock bands that Mayall had a hand in creating. The blues-focused vision that Mayall brought to popular music in the 1960s turns out to have been, in retrospect, 20/20.

In the 21st century, conversations about the British blues boom have focused on these important foundational aspects—and raised thorny questions regarding cultural appropriation. But there is no doubt that Mayall’s adoration of the blues was genuine and uncynical, not to mention daring, vanguard, and subversive—an important dent in the armor of postwar, stiff-upper-lip, class-divided Britain. As Mayall and other proselytizers brought the work of Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Elmore James to ravenous young audiences on the other side of the Atlantic, those blues legends began to find themselves in demand as concert attractions, sought out as musical mentors, and anointed as cultural icons in Europe, America, and, in time, across the globe.

John Mayall was born in 1933 and grew up in the town of Cheadle Hulme, outside of Manchester. His parents divorced when he was a boy. The best-known exploit of Mayall’s childhood was that he built a treehouse out of window frames and tarps in a sturdy oak behind his mother’s house, outfitting it with a bed and paraffin lamp. This, he said, “became my room, my world.” (In 1970, he wrote a song about it, “Home in a Tree.”) His father made a hobby out of jazz guitar and, the young Mayall, at age 12, had likewise begun to play the instrument, along with the piano. By the late 1940s, he had become besotted with jazz, Hoovering up 78 rpm records. And then he stumbled on the blues—the genre that would transfix him for the rest of his days.

As a white suburban kid growing up in England after the war, listening to the blues brought Mayall face to face with the genre’s outsized personalities and the harsh conditions they often sang about. As Mayall told the Guardian in 2021, “So-called ‘race records’ told the story of the vile lynchings and racial injustices in the south that were a black man’s reality in the early 20th century. Not many other people I knew were all that interested in this music, but it was something I was really passionate about.”

In 1956, Mayall had returned from national service in Korea to attend art college in Manchester, forming his first band, the Powerhouse Four. This was followed by the Blues Syndicate, which traveled to London in 1961, whereupon Mayall met Korner, who encouraged him to move south. Mayall threw himself into the London blues scene, forming his Bluesbreakers and becoming a mainstay at such clubs as the Marquee. If the blues-infused Rolling Stones were on a trajectory of international pop stardom, the Bluesbreakers were musician’s musicians, all about integrity—the spirit of the blues. They were the perfect band for record-collecting blues trainspotters, a group that would never be tainted by huge commercial success: the stuff of the purist, not the tourist.

Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were a clearinghouse for generational talent. Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds and joined the band; his playing was featured on its debut LP, released in 1966. When Clapton left, Peter Green, later to found Fleetwood Mac, joined. And when Green left, Mick Taylor, later of the Rolling Stones, joined. Mayall was to British blues guitarists what Leo Castelli was to New York painters; his group was the blue-chip gallery you wanted to show your work in. The bassist Jack Bruce met Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, then went on to found Cream. Other future rock stars who were Mayall alumni: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, later of Fleetwood Mac, and the well-traveled drummer Aynsley Dunbar. In these Bluesbreakers incarnations, and in many more that would follow, Mayall moved between guitar and keyboards, with spotlight moments to demonstrate his prowess on harmonica. Even so, Mayall’s chief talent may have been his uncanny, unselfish capacity for spotting it in others.

In the late ’60s, Mayall expatriated to California, moving into a house in Laurel Canyon that became affectionately known as The Brain Damage Club, based on the kind of personalities and diversions one could find there. The house burned to the ground in the 1979 Kirkwood Bowl-Laurel Canyon Fire, which consumed all of Mayall’s archives, along with the trove of vintage erotica his father had amassed. (“My father was a pornography collector,” Mayall would unabashedly say. “A totally irreplaceable collection.”) Throughout the ensuing decades, there were more concerts, tours, collaborations, and albums, as Mayall became invariably known as the Godfather of the British Blues. In 2005, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. A 35-disc boxed set of Mayall’s work was released in 2021. Three years later he was inducted, at age 90, into the Rock & Roll Hall of fame. Mayall married twice; he had six children and several grandchildren.

A cornerstone of the Mayall songbook was “Room to Move,” powered by his propulsive, almost orgiastic harmonica. But if one song defined him, it was perhaps “All Your Love,” a mambo-inflected Chicago blues classic by Otis Rush, which was the Bluesbreakers’ calling card and an early showcase for Clapton’s fretboard pyrotechnics. (Peter Green recast “All Your Love” as “Black Magic Woman,” which became a 1968 single for Fleetwood Mac and a subsequent signature for Carlos Santana.)

In February of 2020, on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, Mayall, shockingly spry at 86, sang “All Your Love” with gusto at the London Palladium as part of an all-star tribute concert organized by Mick Fleetwood to celebrate Green’s music. (Green died about five months later.) It would be difficult to conjecture how many times Mayall performed that number and others like it—typically three-chord, 12-bar blues songs.

When a reporter once asked John Mayall about his unwavering fidelity to the blues, the music that took him from a tree house in a Manchester suburb to concert stages around the world, Mayall responded, “There’s nothing else I can play.”

Clapton at his rawest....

RIP John......................

A true icon is all respects. I’ve been a fan of Mayall’s stuff for ages and felt he was THE GUY to play with when it came to establishing a foundation from which to build upon. His legacy speaks for itself. ’Blues For The Lost Days’ will always take residence at the top of my playlist.

Very sad news. A true legend. And what talented musicians who were part of that legacy. Rest in peace.

RIP

[www.bbc.com]

RIP, a true legend.
Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, what a team !

***
I'm just a Bad Boy Boogie

RIP Mr Mayall. Great artist, great band, great incubator.

Rod

John Mayall is dead...I think to his song ”J B Lenoir is dead ” from his fondamental album ” Crusade ”...what a man what a life !

John Mayall - great legacy. I Saw him 20 years ago om Train Aarhus. Same place where Bill Wymann and Mick Tailor had a concert. A great musician and band Leader .
RIP

Aah, that is sad. What a musician, great soul - where would we be without him?

RIP, John, or - in other case - just keep on playing!

Thank you John for open our ears a
nd minds
Truly the best inspiration for decades for our generation
Rest in peace

Safe journey John.

An important and pioneering figure of the British Blues scene.

Rest in peace, John Mayall.

RiP John Mayall. †

RIP John Mayall “Pioneer of the British blues”.

We owe him a lot. He did so much for the music
we love.

Mr Mayall, Live Forever

RIP

I will always recall the first time I've heard "Blues from Laurel Canyon" and its stunning intro, played by someone you will know better later.
Then indeed, I had to get more albums.
Later John Mayall did some very good ones.

R.I.P

HMN

By Mick Jagger: "So sad to hear of John Mayall’s passing. He was a great pioneer of British blues and had a wonderful eye for talented young musicians, including Mick Taylor - who he recommended to me after Brian Jones died - ushering in a new era for the Stones."


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By Ronnie Wood: "I’m sad to hear about the death of my friend John Mayall. John was historically such an important figure in the English Blues scene. He nurtured the talent of many great guitarists including Peter Green, Eric Clapton and Mick Taylor. He was a walking encyclopaedia of American and English blues and a musical trailblazer for all of us. Thank you John, God bless. John was a fellow artist and we are photographed here at the Vorpal Gallery, Laguna Beach, in July 1980 with Joni Mitchell, Klaus Voormann, Commander Cody and Deborah Chesher."


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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2024-07-24 16:35 by Irix.

What an influential person in presenting the blues to the UK, planting those seeds, and watching them grow through an amazing list of talented artists that also had a passion for this music.

RIP and safe journey to John

[youtu.be]

video: [www.youtube.com]



HMN



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2024-07-24 14:53 by Honestman.

Perfectly said...This sums up John's role in the development of british blues.

A great loss but I think any of us would take living till 90 right now.

Here's a great clip of John Mayall with Mick Taylor from French TV in 1968.

RIP John.

With Alexis Korner he was pretty much a pioneer and maestro of British blues movement. In a way he continued from where Alexis' Blues Incorporated left us: his Bluesbreakers was a sort of high school of British blues musicians. As the graduates conquered the world, John kept on playing the blues.

Nice to see Mick acknowledging John's contribution as well: he gave us Mick Taylor.

- Doxa

Quote
roryfaninva
Clapton at his rawest....

That is the album in where Clapton became Clapton, a head above any white blues boy playing the blues. Some even claim that this album is the most influental album ever to spread the gospel of guitar playing. There would be hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of little claptons all over the world copying the style of blues solos played there.

- Doxa



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2024-07-24 16:07 by Doxa.