Ellen
McIlwaine
Ellen McIlwaine (left) is featured at the 20th Annual Women's Blues Revue at Massey Hall, 8 p.m. on Nov. 25, along with Sue Foley, Rita Chiarelli, Diana Braithwaite, Saidah Baba Tabilah and more. McIIwaine says that events such as the WBR make all the difference in helping women in the music business.
Ellen McIlwaine is one of the world's top slide guitarists, she has an amazing vocal range and, as a songwriter, was a pioneer in introducing compositions influenced by world music to a new generation.
After making music for 41 years now, McIlwaine plans to write her autobiography. Her story, from her childhood in Japan, to the heady days in New York's Greenwich Village in the '60s and through performing and recording with a veritable who's who of musicians, should make fascinating reading.
McIlwaine, who was born in Nashville, Tenn., was adopted by southern Presbyterian missionaries and spent 15 years in Kobe, Japan, where she was exposed to many types of music including rock 'n' roll, New Orleans-style R&B, Japanese classical and folk music, jazz, country and European classical music. She began playing rock `n' roll piano at the age of five. Speaking about her parents, she told Calgary's Avenue magazine, "I was put into this world to loosen them up. A musical career is not what they would have wanted for me."
In 1963, McIlwaine returned to the United States with her parents and attended art school in Atlanta for two years. She performed at local clubs, at first
on piano, then on guitar, all the while absorbing some of the great soul music and R&B of the time, as well as Gospel. In 1966, when she landed in Greenwich
Village, she discovered the slide guitar.
"My first guitar was a nylon-string classical guitar. I went to New York, and after I'd been playing for about a year, I saw someone play slide guitar. My friend said, `We have to put steel strings on your guitar and a neck bent,' and I got the guitar I have today," McIlwaine says on the telephone from Calgary, where she's lived since 1992.
"I was in New York City, and there were all kinds of people around. I asked Richie Havens to show me tunings. And he said, `Just make up your own.' I couldn't have reached his tunings _ I have big hands but his hands are huge. I just started from there making up tunings.
"I think the reason that I played slide was that I grew up listening to shamisen (a Japanese string instrument) music in Japan. I wasn't stuck to major scales like you are when you play where the frets are. When you use a slide, you're not stuck with the frets, you can play all the notes in between," she says.
McIlwaine played at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village for six months, opening for, among others, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, John Hammond/Jimi (Hendrix) James & The Blue Flames, Big Joe Williams and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, as well as the comedian Richard Pryor.
She says about that time, "A bunch of us were broke, and nobody heard of us yet, and we were all hanging around. Richie Havens was one of those people, Jimi Hendrix, Alvin Bishop. The only other woman who was around at that point was Maria Muldaur. She played fiddle in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. It was difficult to be taken seriously, especially as a guitar player."
McIlwaine moved to Woodstock, N.Y., in 1967, formed her own band and released Fear Itself in 1969, the first of the dozen albums she was to record.
Looking back on the highlights of her busy career, McIlwaine says, "The things that stand out were the fact that I was in Greenwich Village in '66, and I did play with Jimi Hendrix and I did hang out with Jimi Hendrix before he went to England and got famous. Then I played with George Thorogood. I did a lot of double bills with Tom Waits in the '70s. I also opened for Laura Nyro and Lily Tomlin, the only women who ever asked me to open the show for them."
In the '80s, McIlwaine started playing Canadian folk festivals. "I did a few in the States, but the ones up here really impressed me," she says.
"I really got into playing up here, and I started playing six-nighters in blues bars with a bass player and drummer, and that certainly paid my rent for many years."
McIlwaine's 1982 recording, Everybody Needs It, featured bassist Jack Bruce, an artist who influenced her and whose songs she covered on several of her albums. In the early '90s, she toured with another one of her heroes, Johnny Winter, and she was featured on Sue Foley's 2005 compilation record Blues Guitar Women.
McIlwaine was writing songs influenced by the music of the Mideast, South Asia and the Far East long before the term "world music" was coined. In 1972, she wrote a song called We The People, which was based on Indian raga.
Today, those multicultural influences still reign in her music, on a foundation of blues. Her latest CD, Mystic Bridge, is to be released this month on Ellen McIlwaine Music. About the recording, she says, "The heart is in India, the soul is in the South (U.S.) and the voice is in the Middle East." Cassius Khan plays tabla and McIlwaine is on acoustic guitar.
McIlwaine, however, promises to bring her electric guitar to the 20th annual Women's Blues Revue, at which she is featured on a bill with Rita Chiarelli, Saidah Baba Tabilah, Sue Foley, Diana Braithwaite and more, at 8 p.m. on Nov. 25 at Massey Hall.
McIlwaine says that events such as the WBR "make all the difference" in helping women in the music business. She has performed at the WBR a couple of times and is looking forward to playing with the WBR Band, led by Lily Sazz, again.
"When I recommend female musicians to people, they all seem to live in the Toronto area. I think there's a big concentration of women players there," McIlwaine says.
For more information about Ellen McIlwaine, visit www.ellenmcIlwaine.com.
- Ruth Schweitzer