Blues Music Magazine

Blues Music Magazine – APRIL 2018

PHOTOGRAPHY © JOSEPH A. ROSEN

James Armstrong Music Heals

by Art Tipaldi
T.S. Eliot once wrote, “April is the cruelest month.” That is certainly true for guitarist James Armstrong. For on April 28, 1997, as this talented young Oakland guitarist was preparing for his first coast-to-coast tour, tragedy of the random sort we are too familiar with struck.

Armstrong was home with his children when an intruder broke in the apartment, stabbed him with a kitchen knife, and threw his son, two-year-old James Jr., from the second story balcony to the street below.

“We lived in a safe area, and I always left the door unlocked. He just walked into the kitchen and was opening drawers like he was looking for something. The kids were in the living room, and I got on the phone and dialed 911. When I turned around to see where he was, his arm was already cocked back and ready to stab me,” remembers Armstrong.

“I didn’t have any time to react. I just tried to ward off the attack. I figured if I got him outside the house, that’d distract him from my family. He stabbed me in the back as I was trying to crawl to the door. When I opened the door, I though he would be behind me. I looked down and that’s when I saw that he’d tossed two-year-old James Jr. out the window.”

The good news is that James Jr. has grown into an outstanding 23-yearold man with no effects of the attack. The long-term effects of that attack have haunted Armstrong for these two decades. Most distressing was the injury to Armstrong’s left forearm. “The first stab was in my upper chest and severed the artery that runs to my left arm. For a while, I couldn’t use my whole arm, but the arm slowly came back. The hand took longer.

“I still don’t have the dexterity of my fingers. It looks like my hand works, but the fingers don’t go where they are supposed to go. I have nerve damage and only 60% strength. I basically can only play with two fingers (index and middle). The tip of the third finger still doesn’t bend. I can do quite a bit of chording on two strings, but I still can’t do a three-string chord or a full-fingered chord. I consider myself the best twofinger guitar player on the planet,” laughs Armstrong.

But the confidence has been slowly returning. Today, he feels he is able to do things he never thought he would do again. “My confidence starting to come back has been the major difference for me. I can never play like I used to, but I’m able to play a lot better. It’s all new and fresh.

“After this year, I’m playing better than I ever have. For 20 years, it hurt. The look on my face wasn’t passion, it was pain. I thought that I’d never be able to play fast like everybody else. Something has lifted and now that’s gone.”

Since he first picked up a guitar, Armstrong always allowed these six strings to be his voice. Armstrong’s early life was music centered, but not the blues. He grew up in Santa Monica, the son of a jazz guitarist. So as a child, Armstrong began backing his father on the drums. “I’d always plucked on the guitar, but I didn’t want to play it because my father did. One day when I was ten, I was sitting on the couch I picked it up, and I was able to get through some chords.”

After Armstrong became decent on the guitar, his father had a chalkboard in the living room with music theory on it for Armstrong to learn everyday after school. “Because he was a jazz guy, he wanted me to learn how to read. So every time I came home from elementary school, he had a chalkboard that I’d have to sit for an hour so he could teach me music theory.”

From there, Armstrong formed his first band in seventh grade. “I remember one time, my dad had some producers come over, and we thought we were gonna be the next Jacksons. It didn’t quite work out that way.

“When I was 14, I became involved with a country singer, and I played straight country gigs for two years working four or five nights a week. I was still in school, so I had to go outside on the breaks. I even missed my high school graduation because the band had a tour.”

Enter the Allman Brothers. “I thought blues was all these old guys like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. I couldn’t relate to it. Then, I when I was 16, I was at a party and I heard the Allman Brothers doin’ ‘Stormy Monday’ and ‘Statesboro Blues.’ I had never heard those songs done that way before. I always heard my dad and the old folks do them. But I heard the Allman Brothers put the fire into them. I made them repeat those songs probably ten times. They had the emotion that I was looking for in a song. I was amazed that you could actually do this to the blues.”

Watching Armstrong onstage, one might see glimpses of Jimi Hendrix. “I actually got into Jimi Hendrix a few weeks after he died. I’d heard of him, but I was somewhere else musically. I had a friend who was into Hendrix, wore the headband and everything. Next thing I know, I’m wearing the headband, and we were trying to talk like Hendrix. I was about 13 or 14 and Are You Experienced was the first album I ever bought. That’s all I listened to for years.

“What was interesting was that I listened so much to him, but I couldn’t physically play like him. But vocally, I was getting into how he sang. My dad’s best friend, Irving Ashby, played guitar with Nat King Cole. I used to go over his house, and he’d give me lessons when I was 19. One time he said, ‘I see you’re into that Hendrix. You know Hendrix once sat in that chair.’ Jimi was going somewhere else before he died and came to see Irving. All I did that night was sit in that chair that Jimi sat in.”

Armstrong was getting deeper into the guitar shredding of blues-rock, when he rediscovered the importance of vocals through Albert Collins, Freddie and Albert King. That was when Bruce Bromberg offered him a recording session with Hightone Records. “He was the producer who produced the first Robert Cray and Joe Louis Walker records at Hightone Records.

He saw me audition with a band and wanted me to go that route. But he wouldn’t sign me for three months because he said, ‘You have too much of that Hendrix thing. Go and woodshed and find James Armstrong and call me in three months. I did what he said, called him and we did my first record, Sleeping With A Stranger in 1996.”

That record was released to critical acclaim. His third album, Got It Goin’ On, opened the eyes of the blues world. At the 2001 Blues Music Awards, formerly the W. C. Handy Awards, the title cut was nominated as 2001 Song of the Year and Armstrong as Contemporary Male Blues Artist. What followed, however, became a decade long recording gap. In 2011, Armstrong hooked up with Catfood Records, home of Johnny Rawls, to record Blues At The Border.

Why a 10-year hiatus from recording? “In that time period, I was still touring 125 to 150 shows a year, but mentally and physically, I didn’t know if I would record again because I couldn’t play the way I wanted to. That was the main reason I didn’t pursue recording. I still wrote songs for myself, but I didn’t think I could play enough to put something out in the world.

“When I recorded Blues At The Border, I started feeling better about myself. A little after that was when I wrote Guitar Angels and started believing that I had these angels who really wanted me to continue.”

With Guitar Angels, Armstrong hooked up with his “angels,” Rawls, Jim Gaines, and Bob Trenchard at Catfood Records. That partnership came together to also produce his current record, Blues Been Good To Me, reviewed in BMM #16. Most impressive is instead of dazzling listeners with rapid-fire fretboard runs, Armstrong perfectly showcases an economical guitar approach that compels in its emotional urgency.

Born in the 1950s, Armstrong feels like his blues, though rooted in the blues of the masters, must also stand to represent his own generation. In Armstrong’s case, the music he plays also must be original. “I definitely feel a cultural link when I play the blues. That’s one of the reasons that I want to keep this music alive. Any artist who paints or sculpts or plays music has to have his own voice. Buddy Guy and B.B. King don’t sound like anybody. That’s something that makes the blues so timeless. What I learned from the injury is that the most important sound is what’s in between the notes. When you have the space, the audience is waiting to hear what’s coming.”