Photo by Carl Warren
By Diane Miller
Fargo Blues Festival kicks off this Friday and guitarist Walter Trout will take our local stage for the fifth or sixth time this Saturday. The performance will include a special appearance by local keyboardist/Trout’s former band mate, Paul Kallestad.
Ranked by a BBC poll as the “Sixth Greatest Guitar Player of All Time,” Trout’s talent as a blues guitarist is unprecedented.
At the age of 62, Trout has released more than 20 albums and he still performs regularly.
“I still get the same rush I got when I was 18,” Trout said.
Most recently, Trout released a tribute album to one of his blues guitar heroes, Luther Allison.
“I really wanted to do a tribute to an old buddy of mine who was sort of a mentor to me and I thought was a genius performer and just an incredible person with an unbelievable heart and soul and warmth and humor about him,” Trout said. “(Allison) was an incredible, charismatic, amazing guy. I feel very lucky to have been his friend.”
Similar to Allison, Trout is an American blues musician who got his start in Europe: “I was lucky in that I got signed to a European label when I started. On my second album I had a massive, massive hit. That album outsold Madonna, Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams.”
It wasn’t until the late half of the 90s that Trout started touring the states. Around then, Kallestad and Trout were living in the same town, Huntington Beach, Calif.
Kallestad gigged regularly as a keyboardist, and he recalled the first time he saw Trout perform. He said he was so impressed, he asked the keyboardist if he could sit in on a song. The keyboardist said no then, but, lucky for Kallestad, that musician eventually left the band.
“A buddy of mine in who I played with on Sunday nights at a jam sessions goes, ‘Hey, Walter is looking for a keyboard player, and I dropped your name so you might be expecting a call,’” Kallestad said. “I think the next day Walter called.”
The Fargo native played and toured with Trout for three years, traveling all over northern Europe and all over the U.S.
“I was living my dream,” Kallestad said.
“(Trout is) extremely expressive as a guitarist. It’s not all about blazing speed. It’s not all about music school technical excellence. His feel, his ability to convey emotion through his guitar playing is relatively unparalleled.”
Blues music has been around for more than 100 years and, to this day, is still a prominent and popular musical genre. Trout thinks it has something to do with universality.
“I think it’s timeless because it’s sort of the perfect vehicle genre for a musician to express some pretty basic human feelings that are shared among everybody,” he said. “There is always going to be an audience for music that is based in human feeling.”
IF YOU GO:
WHAT: Fargo Blues Fest
WHERE: Newman Outdoor Field, 1515 15th Ave, Fargo
WHEN: Fri & Sat, Aug. 16-17
INFO: http://fargobluesfest.com/
Source:
http://hpr1.com/music/article/walter_trouts_blue_notes/