Mike Bloomfield - east meets west

For a time back in the mid to late 1960s...

...Mike Bloomfield was as significant a player on the US white blues scene as Clapton was on the UK's.

Born into a prosperous Jewish family living on Chicago’s North Side, Bloomfield became infatuated with the music that came from the city’s black South Side. The white teenager became not only accepted, but admired by the black blues musicians he met there. Muddy Waters, BB King and Buddy Guy all supported his early career, so he must have impressed them profoundly.

Those early days in Chicago gave rise to the band that brought Bloomfield to greater public attention. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (they dropped the ‘Paul’ later) comprised Bloomfield on guitar, Paul Butterfield on harp and vocals, Elvin Bishop on guitar and vocals, Sam Lay on drums, Jerome Arnold on bass guitar and Mark Naftalin on keyboards.

This was a rare thing in 1960s America – a mixed-race band. Lay and Arnold were black and had formerly comprised not just any black rhythm section, but Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm section!

Their first eponymous album was good, but not earth-shattering. It revealed a band which had quickly gelled together and showed off everyone’s chops well, although Bishop had yet to play any lead guitar. Listening to it alongside the Mayall/Clapton "Beano" album at the time, it seemed a little refined and, as a budding guitarist back then, Clapton’s playing sounded rawer and more direct to me. Thinking about it now, I realise that Bloomfield’s playing was actually far more fluent and less confined to the normal pentatonic licks than Clapton’s. I managed to nail Clapton’s style pretty well after a while, but the way Bloomfield played was far less easy to copy. I still listen to Bloomfield in awe of the way he strung licks into runs, especially when they descended, which I've always found to be the trickier direction.

Anyway, when the ‘difficult’ second album from the Butterfield Band came along Bloomfield’s playing had changed and progressed so dramatically that I gave up trying to copy him and just listened instead.

This album – "East West" – was unlike anything white blues guys had ever produced before. Hell, it was unlike anything anyone had produced before.

For the first time, you had a blues-influenced electric band stretching out on long improvised tracks and smashing down the boundaries between musical genres with a merging of elements of blues, jazz, Indian raga and folk music.

The track responsible for this was the title track – a 13 minute piece which included solos from Butterfield, Bloomfield and Bishop, with stellar support from the three other guys - Mark Naftalin, Jerome Arnold and Billy Davenport who'd replaced Sam Lay in between albums.

It evolved over time from a piece called ‘Raga’ and the recorded version captures it in the middle of its development with subsequent live versions becoming longer and even more complex. Fortunately, some of the versions of what was always ‘a work in progress’ are available on a commercially-released CD called ‘East West Live’ which includes a 28 minute version that reveals an intensity and complexity that has never been bettered. Even when Bloomfield and Bishop step back to play rhythm they layer tritone chords in a way I’ve never heard before or since and when the various musicians cut loose – and they all do on this version, which is noticeably less polite than any of the other versions available – the results are just brain-meltingly good.

The original was the first ‘modern’ recording I’d ever heard which took me to ‘another place’. Yes, Clapton’s playing on the ‘Beano’ album went for the ears and guts, but Bloomfield’s also went for the heart and mind. He showed me that music could take you to places you’d never been and that only existed in your mind anyway. They were unique and private places I could visit whenever I dropped the needle onto the vinyl and that Bloomfield was creating for me and everyone else who cared to listen.

It was the first ‘head’ music.

It’s my contention that without Bloomfield modern rock guitar would have remained essentially blues-based and anyone who played outside of that format would have found it far more difficult to gain acceptance. In ‘East West’ you can spot the birth of improvisation that the Grateful Dead, Hendrix, Cream-era Clapton and many others capitalised on, leaving the blues behind for a while and opening everyone’s minds to music beyond it for many, many years to come.

In a nutshell, with ‘East West’ Bloomfield gave to rock what Miles gave to jazz with ‘Kind of Blue’.

Freedom.

To get hold of a copy of "East West", and also the stunning live collection, just answer the laughably easy question in the comments below. 

Hear how the boundaries were broken!