Listening to James “Blood” Ulmer is like listening to the history of American music distilled through one man’s vision and experience. His guitar playing fuses all his musical experiences, from church music to free jazz and funk-rock fusion to his ragged and personal blues.
Ulmer’s name doesn’t usually appear in those “50 Best Guitarists” lists that pop up online every once in a while. But some music critics have called Ulmer “the most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix.” (And, just so you’re not scrolling those lists in suspense, Hendrix is almost always No. 1).
“(Hendrix) played (guitar) behind his back and lit it on fire,” says Ulmer, 79. “I don’t work like (Hendrix). I use the guitar to do what I do.”
Ulmer will appear at Mount Gretna Playhouse at 7:30 p.m. Saturday as part of the Gretna Music series.
To paraphrase a famous quote from Miles Davis, it takes a long time to sound like yourself. Ulmer’s sound twists and turns through 75 years of guitar playing that included gospel, doo-wop, R&B, jazz, funk, free jazz, rock and blues, and landed finally on some indescribable fusion of all of those genres.
As a young child growing up in South Carolina, Ulmer played guitar in church with the Seven Sons and opened for the Five Blind Boys and the Dixie Hummingbirds and other famous Southern gospel groups.
When he was 18, Ulmer moved to Pittsburgh and eventually got a gig playing guitar behind the Del-Vikings —the doo-wop group with the hit “Come Go With Me.”
“Pittsburgh is where I decided I was going to play music,” Ulmer says. “When I came to Pittsburgh, there was a singing group on every corner.”
From Pittsburgh, Ulmer went to Columbus, Ohio, and played and recorded with Hank Marr — a jazz musician and virtuoso on the Hammond B3 organ. At the time, Ulmer’s style was reminiscent of legendary jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery. Ulmer even played a gig in front of his idol.
“I played in this town one night and he was at the bar,” Ulmer says. “I played two sets at the club and he stayed. I stood next to him and he never said anything. I stopped playing like him. I didn’t feel like it anymore. That’s when I went free. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t sound like I sound now. I would’ve sounded like Wes Montgomery. So I’m glad he didn’t say nothing to me.”
Ulmer started his own group, Blood and the Blood Brothers, in Detroit.
“Detroit is where I really got into jazz. It was a music town,” Ulmer says. “You had to be ready to play everything in Detroit. You played blues one night, you played jazz the next night and you played rock ’n’ roll the next weekend. As long as it was called music, I wanted to be in it.”
Ulmer was encouraged to leave Detroit for New York and search out Miles Davis who, at the time, was incorporating rock-style guitar into his music. He didn’t link up with Davis, but he did connect with some legends of jazz, including Art Blakey, Rashied Ali, Joe Henderson, Larry Young, Don Cherry, David Murray and, most importantly, the pioneer of avant-garde free jazz, Ornette Coleman.
Coleman developed harmolodics, a theory of music that focused on the freedom of any individual player to express their own improvisational ideas in relation to the melody and harmony. After playing with Ulmer, Coleman called him a natural harmolodic player and Ulmer joined Coleman’s band.
“I moved into (Coleman’s) house,” Ulmer says. “He was a hard-working man. He believed in what he was doing. He thought harmolodic music was a music to be reckoned with. And it is too. He had a vision for this music. He thought it was an original American music that didn’t have anything to do with European classical music.”
While working with Coleman, Ulmer had a dream that changed the course of his playing. He dreamed of a tuning — he calls it unison tuning — where every string was tuned to the same note. It adds a unique droning aspect to his guitar sound.
Coleman would later appear as a sideman on Ulmer’s 1979 release “Tales of Captain Black.” Ulmer followed that up with his most well-known record, “Are You Glad to be in America?” which featured the mantralike “Jazz is the Teacher (Funk the Preacher)” and the title track (Ulmer’s most well-known song), which featured Ulmer on vocals.
Ulmer continued his harmolodic approach in all of his next projects, including Music Revelation Ensemble, Odyssey Band, Black Rock Band and other combinations that featured free jazz experiments and a funk rock and punk approach.
He connected with guitarist Vernon Reid through these bands, and the persistent Reid saw something of a bluesman in Ulmer and convinced him to record some blues records. His guitar style and his ragged voice gives his version of the blues its unique texture.
Ulmer had a difficult relationship with the blues. As a child, growing up in the church, the blues was taboo. His parents forbade him to listen to the blues, which they associated with drinking and bad morals.
“There were three guitar players in my town that played blues, and I used to go and sneak and listen to them play,” Ulmer says. “But I never played it on the guitar until lately.”
After years of playing experimental free jazz, Ulmer looked back to the blues for his future in music. Despite the temporal tempo shift, Ulmer couldn’t have made his type of blues music without first learning about free jazz and harmolodics.
The connection between free jazz and blues may not be evident, but it’s there in his freedom of expression. For Ulmer, blues is about expressing your emotions. Just as free jazz players are inspired to search their soul and express themselves with their instrument, blues players are concerned with their feelings. If they feel like changing tempo or adding an extra chorus, that’s what they do.
“Blues is a music that has been misunderstood,” Ulmer says. “I’m trying to bring clarity to blues. The blues have something to do with the truth.”
But Ulmer’s blues don’t sound like what many people would consider to be traditional blues. Even Ulmer agrees that his droning, spiderlike improvisations aren’t even what he thinks of as blues.
“When you say blues, I think of B.B. King. B.B. King is a blues man. I don’t put myself in his category,” Ulmer says. “He was singing blues long before I was. I remember one time I was playing a gig and B.B. King came. He was like 22 years old and he asked to sit in. I gave him my guitar and he played that guitar and I never let anybody sit in on my guitar since.”
His latest exploration of the blues isn’t some type of throwback act. His whole career has been about exploring the music he feels inside.
“When you decide to play music, you have to find out how you’re going to play it first,” Ulmer says. “When you feel music in yourself, then you have to decide what instrument you’re going to use to do it. And some people try a lot of different instruments and sometimes you get stuck on the wrong instrument. I think it can be a real problem.”
Ulmer says he hopes to record six more albums, including revisitations of his Music Revelation Ensemble, the Odyssey Band and Black Rock Band.
“I just keep playing the guitar every day,” Ulmer says.