By Steven Spearie, Correspondent, State Journal Register
http://www.sj-r.com/article/20151021...LIFE/151029891
Posted Oct. 21, 2015 at 10:30 PM
First, a music history lesson, compliments of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and founding member of Traffic, Dave Mason.
"The British Invasion was actually an American invasion," insisted Mason, whose "Traffic Jam" tour visits the Sangamon Auditorium Saturday, during a recent phone interview.
"We picked up the legacy of blues music and in doing so, turned America back to its own music."
After all, said Mason, it wasn't "some guy from Scotland who taught Eric Clapton how to play the blues. It was the Chicago blues players.
"As English musicians, we coveted it and molded it into our own."
The 69-year-old Mason said that his appreciation for blues music can be traced back to listening to the BBC while growing up. Music wasn't segregated like on American radio stations, he said, so rock ‘n’ roll meant to him artists as diverse as Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.
When he moved to Chicago in the early 1980s, Mason, a Brit who is still an alien resident, said he would stop in blues haunts like Kingston Mines and Buddy Guy's Legends, where he would jam with musicians like Guy and Otis Rush, "one of my favorite guitar players of all time." (Rush was debilitated by a 2004 stroke.)
"I'm not per se a blues player," said Mason. "I can pull off certain things, and when I'm soloing, it's all over that."
Even a surprise entry like "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys," penned by Steve Winwood and recorded by Traffic after Mason's departure, "basically becomes a blues song," promised Mason. "It's a completely different arrangement."
Mason rolled out "Traffic Jam" in mid-2014 with the idea of primarily playing material from the group's first two albums, "Mr. Fantasy" and "Traffic," both of which he was part. The other half of the show includes his eclectic solo material, including "We Just Disagree" and "Let It Go, Let It Flow" and cuts from 2014's "Future's Past," making the night, Mason said, "a musical biography."
"I try to pick things that are fun to play," said Mason, whose backing band includes guitarist Johnne Sambataro, the former frontman for Firefall. "When you're out on the road for two to three months at a time, you need to keep it fresh. You don't want to appear as if you're going through the motions."
Mason, who has worked with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Fleetwood Mac over his career, called Traffic, which also included Winwood and the late Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood, "one of the original alternative bands."
"The songs might have been written years ago, but they still hold up."