 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I have as my guest Paul Asbell. Paul, how are you? I am good today. I hope you are too and everybody out there. It's a beautiful sunny day, but let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. Paul Asbell is a musician who played the blues in Chicago and since the early 1970s has created a multi-faceted musical career here in northern Vermont. So it's short for a very long career, but we're going to ask you lots of questions about your life. So I want to first say Tina Turner. Yeah. I mean, her life is a lot of music, but it's also what a story. And for women. So anyway, I just wanted to... Yeah, well, let's... You better be good to her up there wherever she is. So Paul, tell us a little bit about your early years growing up, your childhood, a little bit about your youth. Well, I grew up in Chicago. I grew up in a way that most people, it's so much different than most people. My folks moved to Chicago from New York in 1946. And my dad and mom were kind of a pair. They were hired to open the chapter of what's called People's Songs in Chicago. There already was a chapter, but they were very active in New York. And People's Songs was basically sort of a left-wing-oriented labor movement, civil rights-oriented bunch of folks that is the sort of the beginnings of what we often think of as the protest song movement. But this was back in the mid-40s. And my dad and his associates were people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who was often a guest at our house when we moved to Chicago. And these people were around all the time. And my dad was a musician of sorts. He became really a freelance and book author in his somewhat later life. And that's really what he felt he was kind of born to do. But he was a folk singer and a songwriter in the beginning. And so I heard music around the house, not from the radio or obviously I heard records, but also he was always rehearsing with people downstairs when I was trying to go to sleep. And Pete Seeger would come over the house and he would have his banjo case and he'd have an ax. And I never understood the ax part till much later. It was explained to me that this was part of the stage setup. But these were people that I took for granted as kind of growing knowing about. And so one of the things that I just saw music all the time. We were on the south side of Chicago. I was born at 47th and Drexel. Anybody who knows kind of the geography of Chicago will probably say, really? It was a neighborhood. There was the edge of a neighborhood called Bronzeville. And you can probably guess what the bronze term meant. And I looked at my kindergarten picture, you know, maybe when I was about 30 years old, founded my mom, you know, a bunch of stuff in my mom's and like, there's 50 kids in that class and which one's Paul? Oh, he's the only little white face. Okay, got it. And I, you know, I didn't even remember it quite that way. But it was just it was growing up as a minority and the majority culture is something that most white people don't have really a sense of. And that was something that was a big part of my upbringing. And it was kind of and it shapes your life in a lot of ways. What an extraordinary childhood. Extraordinary. So who would you say provided you with the greatest inspiration to pursue your music career? You mean kind of musical inspiration, I suspect? Musical inspiration. Well, I think if you asked almost any musician that would evolve over the years. There were people like Doc Watson in Mississippi, John Hurt and Leighton and Hopkins who and Bob Dylan for that matter who when I kind of came of age around, you know, 12, 13 years old, those were people that I heard who as I often kind of reference it like they put the hair up on my head. You know, I, I, the hair stood on the back of my head up when I listened to them and I knew, okay, this is something very special. It's speaking to me. And you know, quite different than music from the radio that spoke to some of my friends and stuff. And there was a small group of people who kind of got that, you know, music often is a niche thing. And it's also kind of a bonding thing for people. But you know, that as I learned to play a little bit more and play better and stuff, that changed. Those people were all basically acoustic guitar players and folk oriented performers or blues oriented performers. And at some point, I, you know, electric music at first was just like silliness, you know, and when I saw the Beatles first on Ed Sullivan, like everybody my age, it was like, well, that's, you know, they are kind of cool looking, but I don't know. That's just silly music. And you know, that changed sort of over the years. And it certainly changed when I heard electric blues from my hometown of Chicago, and all of a sudden realized that electric music was not just silly music. I know this is probably very strange sounding to a lot of people. I don't think it is. It certainly isn't to me. I mean, think about Dylan when he went electric and what happened? It was long before that. Aha. This was long before that. So who bought you your first guitar? My dad. Well, I used his guitar. Okay, you used your dad's guitar. I remember very, you know, a very big deal would have been around 1963, maybe, when he actually bought me a, you know, it's kind of a surprise present, a Martin 008. And that's a, you know, kind of an iconic, now iconic guitar. It was just a quality, relatively small guitar that was sort of right for me. And I didn't need to use his Stella anymore. Anyway, the guitarist knows what Stella guitars are. So he was, he was a great inspiration for you as your father. Now, you have recorded with some of the greats, and you mentioned a few of them, but let me. John Lee Hooker, Allen Wolf, Leighton Hopkins, Otis Rush, and others including Paul Butterfield while living in Chicago. Tell us about that time, playing with those greats. Well, these people had all been heroes of mine. And, you know, in my kind of second phase that I alluded to, where all of a sudden I realized that this music that was being made on electric instruments was, was, it had captured my imagination in a huge way. But I started loving it before I was able to be legal to get into clubs. So, and there were clubs that were, you know, muddy waters and junior wells and how the wolf played in clubs that were three, four blocks from where I lived. But I couldn't go there, you know, and I later got false ID like every young musician did in order to be able to get in, and they didn't check really that much. But, but, you know, when I was 14 years old, that wouldn't have worked. And at a small 14 at that. So anyway, I, you know, first heard them from records, even though I knew that they were around my neighborhood, I sometimes even see them sometimes, you know, driving by or parked in front of a club that, but I couldn't go in. And at some point, I was able to go in sometimes with slightly older friends. And I just got, well, I had already been fired up by the music. At some point, I was actually, I started setting, sitting in with groups. And it wasn't long before I was asked to play rhythm guitar for people that really were heroes of mine. I mean, they were before that. And they remained that people like Muddy Waters and Holland Wolf and Otis Rush. And these people were all around the South side, right in the neighborhood I grew up in. So I don't know. It's one thing led to another very quickly back then. Outstanding. I mean, what, what an incredible immersion into some of the greatest music of that time. And I mean, growing up, you know, listening to Pete Seeger, little boxes, and his, his, his effect on the 60s. Yeah, I'm assuming you were a, you were a 60s revolutionary, like me. Well, I mean, I didn't throw any mall top cocktails. Well, of course, not neither did I. But, but I'm assuming that you coming from a liberal family that using that music and the music of Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, you know, our music back then was revel, was music about change? Well, Arlo Guthrie is close to a contemporary of mine. My dad's friends were Woody Guthrie, his dad. And so I was, and there's a lot of what you're saying, that's very true. It was changed that much of which did not happen. And, you know, was a pretty big disappointment to many people. The, but yes, you're, that's right. And that was the year in which I grew up. So, well, you know, I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna defend my generation, our generation is we did help to bring in the civil rights movement, the disability movement, the women's movement. We did fight to shut down a war. And we changed the way that people looked at the earth and the planet Earth Day was, you know, bloomed around that time is certainly women's rights. So I think, and I think the music helped with that, whether it's Joan Baez or Bob Dylan or the, or whomever it was, just in Woodstock, we were, and I'm not saying that that's not happening now, but it's, it's very different. And we'll talk about that. Now, you moved back to Vermont in the early 1970s. And you began your recording career with folks like Big Mama Thornton, Mary McCaslin, Bobby McFerrin and others. Can you talk about those early years in Vermont? And what, what brought you to Vermont from Chicago? Well, my recording career actually had begun in earnest in Chicago, of course. I, when I came to Vermont, which was actually in May of 1971, it's very hard to, if I try to explain what was in my, my, and my girlfriend's mind at the time, it would be nonsensical probably because it was, but the, I had sort of burned out on an extremely intense six night a week, playing situation in Chicago. And I saw kind of the club I played at, I was playing from 10 to four every night. And then on Saturday was 10 to five. So I would be driving home in the daylight. And, you know, that's when I would catch my sleep would be long after the sun came up. And basically, you know, well, is this the life I want to live in the, the kind of halcyon images I had of certain friends who lived in a more rural situation, which I'd never really done. That started to really, really appeal. And I moved to North Duxbury, Vermont, which is basically halfway up Campbell's hump road on the sort of Duxbury, Waterbury side, and bought a little tiny plot of land in full view of Campbell's hump and built a geodesic dome. If anybody has ever read the whole earth catalog, you're reading my life, basically. Yeah, the Savonius rotor, the energy producer that was in Mother Earth news. Yeah, totally. Well, that's, that's our generation, my friend. I think a lot of us came up in the early 1970s and bought a cheap, and then we all got FHA loans, which were like 2% less than a half a percent interest. So Paul, you, you became a member of the band Kilimanjaro and you joined forces with big Joe Burrell and the unknown blues band. Tell us a little bit about Joe and that time in your life during those 20 years. Well, Kilimanjaro was a group of four people at that time. It had actually begun technically as the Paul Asbell quartet and became, you know, because I selected such tremendously, you know, gifted and, and skilled and compatible musicians for that group. We just became something much bigger than one guy's group. So we definitely kind of reflected the, the sort of democracy of the spirit of the thing by calling it Kilimanjaro. And we played in Burlington and kind of regionally, we did a lot of touring later. We were playing music that was vocalist music. It was based on songwriting that really was not very pop. It was a little bit pop, but it had so many jazz influences to it that it's kind of amazing that we were able to do things like play three and sometimes even four night weekends at a hunts, for example, which was the sort of higher ground of Burlington at that time. And the, and I'm sure there's some people around who are old enough to remember all those times. At any rate, this was all happening prior to, not prior to me knowing Big Joe, but prior to us having anything to do with Big Joe sort of on stage. At one point, we started playing with a very good friend of my name, Martin Grosswent. And Martin basically was doing a blues night on Wednesday that we were the band for the Kilimanjaro guys. And as we actually called the band at that time, the unknown blues band, because it was a joke, because really everybody knew that it was Kilimanjaro behind Martin. And that went for a while, and that was a Wednesday, often, not always, but often before our Thursday, Friday, Saturday of Kilimanjaro. And what I'm getting at is that at some point, it became clear that there were other people that would love to fit into this group. And I knew this guy named Big Joe Burrell, who is playing occasionally in town. And I knew that this guy would be a perfect fit for this band that we were calling the unknown blues band. And so I kind of said that, you know, hey, let's invite Joe down. I just, I guarantee you sparks will fly. We don't need to rehearse to do this. And one, the night that that happened, the point was proved that Joe was such an incredible natural fit. What we said at the time was there was a slot in the band that we didn't even know was waiting for Joe. And as soon as Joe came on the scene, bingo, you know, there it is, we've been missing him all along. He's the perfect person to basically front this band. And so anyway, that was really kind of the beginnings of the unknown blues band. And we were originally playing a Wednesday prior to three nights of this sort of jazz pop funk band called Kilimanjaro. And at some point, it became so popular, the unknown blues band thing, that became kind of clear, you know, if we keep doing this guys, this is going to kind of out popular the Kilimanjaro thing. So are we do we really want to do this? And we kind of took a vote, you know, we were democratic. And yeah, sure, we don't know how long Joe will be in the picture and whatever. And so let's just give it all we have. And, you know, so we wound up sort of flip flopping at some point, and we would then then do Kilimanjaro would be the Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday, Saturday would have been the unknown blues band. And then it became Kilimanjaro just on the Wednesday. And, you know, that sort of thing. So it was clear that we were giving our efforts to unknown blues band just because of the popularity. And we're still playing together. And, and sometimes we didn't play some of the same tongs. But anyway, that became our us and Big Joe's kind of entrance onto the scene at that point. On to the stage and of course, Big Joe Burrell's beautiful bronze statue is outside of Halverson's and boy that you guys we all rock to your music with Kilimanjaro and also with Big Joe Burrell. So let's move a little bit into your teaching. You are an educator. You have taught guitar for over 50 years. You taught at the university level at Dartmouth and St. Michael's. And now you're at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. Talk about that part of your life and helping other people to to learn to play to play music. Well, I'll try to. I started teaching. Yeah, I started as I'm thinking about it now, started teaching like in the late 60s while I was still in Chicago. And at some point, I kind of realized that I had learned at that point in almost entirely on my own. I've had two lessons in my life and I never went to music school, you know, to learn the music that I do. And so it was kind of a challenge to think of, all right, well, if yourself taught, then how do you teach somebody else? And somehow I think I kind of figured out some of the aspects of it sort of early on, because there was so many things that I had to figure out for myself. I kind of when I did figure those things out, I tended to remember how I got them. And so I tried to simulate in some ways, how could I, how could I rearrange the order in which I did things so that if I had it to do all the over again, here's what I do first. And here's what I would do next. And here's what I do next. And I wouldn't do that until I had already done this, that kind of thing. That wasn't how I learned. I learned in a very haphazard, passion driven way. But then I tried to kind of make sense of what, you know, rearrange the things. So this is what I would show to somebody else. And that just went for years and years and years of kind of teaching in in private situations one on one, teaching a lot of lessons where everybody who had come would be very, very different in their aspirations and their skill level and stuff like that. And you can't have a one size fits all approach to all of that. I kind of got good at like, no one size fits all teaching. Do you play by ear? Well, it's that that's a complicated, you had to teach yourself to read music, right? Yeah, that's true. And that's, and to do that on your own is you, that would make you a great teacher, because you would know how then to teach someone who doesn't doesn't play music. So talk to us a little bit about your three solo acoustic CDs have received rave reviews for how you intermix blues and jazz with old time country based themes and original pieces from the American Roots tradition. Now this all comes from your website. So I want to direct my viewers to go to the Paul Asbell P-A-U-L-A-S-B-E-L-L.com website where you can read all about Paul and order a CDs and learn about his music and his life. But talk to us about those three CDs. Because you created them recently. Talked about that. Well, the first one I think was in 2002, but I had been making music for an awful long time before that. And it's funny because a guy I know, a friend of mine named Rick Davis, who was a guitar builder. And at that time was also sort of the head Fred, so to speak, of a luthier's guild called Asia. And he encouraged me to perform solos. You're good enough to do it. You're better than some people who do it all the time. Why don't you? You owe it to people. A whole bunch of stuff that I just thought, oh, Rick, I know you completely misunderstand what it is that I do. If this is all me in my head, I don't even think I ever said it. But I thought to myself, what a terrible idea. I'm destined and put on this earth to play with other people. It was seem clear to me. And at some point, well, it's so much harder, especially with guitar, to kind of perform on your own and to make an entire accompaniment or maybe even entire instrumental performance on one instrument, the guitar. But let me just give it a shot. And I started, as a result, kind of going back to the music that I had actually started doing long before I ever picked up an electric guitar, namely the music of people like Mrs. Debbie John Hurt and Lightning Hopkins and Doc Watson and a whole bunch of acoustic styles that grabbed my attention first on guitar. In any rate, I realized, you know, maybe Rick was right. And I started doing, you know, very nervously, doing some solo performances. And I discovered after getting over enough nerves so that I could find, in addition to the nerves, like there's something really great about a roomful of people who are just totally silent, allowing you to fill entirely the space with who you are. And I kind of never experienced that really before. And I was once, you know, as I said, once the nervousness kind of gave way to the sort of exhilaration of, this is kind of cool. And if I say I never look back, that isn't quite true because well, as well, you should never look back. But your your your life is extraordinary. I can do it. I'm doing it tomorrow night, in fact. Well, I mean, so for my viewers, I'm assuming that people can live stream your your music, if they don't want to CD, I'm assuming. I don't there's not a lot of live streaming. I didn't jump on to the live streaming. So the way so the way to listen to your music would be on YouTube or go to your website and you did and at Paul as Bell as be ll.com. And I can see your CDs. Now let's move on to your accolades. You you have received so many accolades and so many awards over the years. Talk to us a little bit about your duo partners about those recordings where you hooked up with people and played on with folks. Well, it's I mean, all along, you know, my entire music world was in bands and of different sizes. I started after I started doing the the the solo thing, you know, that kind of led to playing kind of duos with people like Brooks Williams, who was a, you know, very kind of a roots music guy, much like myself, but also more of a songwriter. And I also started playing. I had already been playing jazz quite a bit. And in jazz, very often for a guitarist, a really good duo is playing with a bass player, an upright bass player. I do that a lot. In a perfect world of, you know, if a jazz artist was asked like, when you play duo, would you in, you know, is duo better than trio or quartet or whatever? I think most jazz people would say, frankly, I like playing with a slightly larger group. I think most people would say that, although sometimes, like as last night, a duo is really fun to do. Last night, tell us about. Well, I just I played with my longtime bassist buddy, Clyde Statz at the American Flatbread. And so there's a lot, which is a great place and we love it. And but there's a lot of times when, you know, the idea of doing a duo is really just because there's not really enough money to pay for two other guys or whatever. And that's a sort of, I won't say it's a dirty little secret, but it's just a reality that basically you're playing duo because it's hard to afford to play. But but also if it's a smaller place, the more people, the louder, once you enter, add drums into the mix, it can get funkier and more, you know, kind of infectious. But but also it's hard not to play louder. So there are places where duo is exactly the right vibe. So I'm gonna have you play something because I'm just getting so eager to hear you. But can you tell folks, I'm gonna tell folks that, look, when you just released Burmese panther, it's original jazz compositions, and you have a lot of concert date scheduled. And so I want my viewers to go again to your website, paulasbellasbel.com backslashgigs backslash and there and you're all your gigs are listed there and people can come out and hear you live. But would you like to play a little something? I would be happy to. I would be so honored. Well, that's really sweet of you to say. Um, yeah, I would be delighted to this song is actually, it's half of the title track of my third acoustic solo CD, which was called Here Goes from adamant to a chafalaya. And oh my god, nobody can pronounce that, including myself. I didn't realize it when I titled it, but there were two songs on it. One of them is called a chafalaya hard thing to pronounce, but that's a swamp in Louisiana that basically has a kind of gave, you know, contributed vibe to a very bluesy kind of song that I'm not going to play. And the other tune on the CD was bound for adamant and which I am going to play. And those two songs kind of represent the sort of spectrum of the music that I love. And so here at any rate is here bound for adamant. Oh, I'm sorry, let me start this again. There we go. That was so beautiful. Thank you, Paul. I want to share with my viewers, we're coming to the end of the show, but I want to share with my viewers. Thank you for that. That was lovely. You hooked up again with Chaz Eller. Now Chaz, Chaz, great guy. He was the Kilimanjaro keyboardist and you just began a two year recording project with him. So I wanted to mention that that's in the works for you, right? Well, just very clear. Chuck has been, I call him Chuck, because everybody calls Chuck Charles Chaz. I know Chuck for such a long time, I can't get it out of money. I'll call him Chuck, right? But anyway, he has been the recording engineer for every one of the recordings that I have, including that most recent jazz one, Burmese Panther, but also the three before. We have collaborated on so many things that such a lot of kind of mutual, shorthand for music stuff. There's a lot of things where we don't have to explain stuff to one another. He'll say it's a little bit and I already know where he's going to, I know what the rest of the sentence is going to be, and I think it's kind of back and forth mutual. So we complete one another sentences in a lot of ways musically. So anyway, he has been a terrific kind of ally in my recordings, and yeah, long time. You've made many, many, many, many friends here in Vermont, and you're so beloved. I just want to ask you one more question before we end. What are some words of wisdom that you would like to leave with us as it relates to the state of humanity in our world? Oh, man. I'll ask, Belle, what's a little bit of your wisdom, your aged wisdom that you'd like to share with my viewers? Oh, man. Well, I don't want to get too long winded about it. I also don't know that wisdom is exactly what I have to impart, but I want to say one little message that my life has been about, which I think I alluded to earlier. I grew up as a distinct minority in the neighborhood that I grew up in. And I think that that's a pretty good way to learn to live. It's definitely has some rough spots. And there's a couple of scars in there as a result of that and a certain amount of intimidation that you see towards your fellow man at times. But the idea of not assuming that somehow you're in the minority on things, if you're in the majority on things, but realizing that you are just one voice, there's an awful lot of other voices, and you can't assume that everybody's like you. And that really, I think, is a lesson you learn when you grow up as a minority. And if there was something that I guess I would pass on, I think, yeah, don't be so sure of yourself and your ideas that you somehow think that all the world agrees with you. And well said, my friend. And I'll tell you, yours is a voice that we have all come to love and appreciate over the years in your humanity and humility are a great comfort. So thank you, Paul Asbell, for your time and your moment with Melinda. I've just loved every second of it. And I hope I can get you back on my show again. And to my viewers, I want to thank you for joining me and Paul today. And I will see you again soon. Have a beautiful day. Bye bye.