frank bey & anthony paule band

frank bey & anthony paule band “Who?” many disc jockeys and record reviewers wondered about Frank Bey when they received copies in February of You Don’t Know Nothing on Blue Dot Records, the Philadelphia blues-and-soul singer’s powerful live recording at Biscuits & Blues in San Francisco with guitarist Anthony Paule’s sizzling seven-piece band. Bey had been performing most of his 67 years — singing gospel music as a kid, opening shows as a teenager for his friend Otis Redding, and recording CDs of his own in 1996 and 2007 — yet somehow his immense talents failed to register on most radar screens. Thanks to You Don’t Know Nothing, Bey is no longer one of the blues world’s best kept secrets. The album received extensive airplay, from Hawaii to Bey’s native Georgia and dozens of U.S. points in between. You Don’t Know Nothing graced playlists throughout Canada and Europe, as well. It peaked at No. 11 on Living Blues magazine’s radio chart. And critics raved. “Frank Bey is a name to watch, an act to catch on this evidence…,” Norman Darwen wrote in his CD review for England’s Blues & Rhythm Magazine. Blues Blast critic Rainey Wetnight called the album “the kind that will make die-hard blues fans sit up and pay attention….” And in Living Blues Magazine, Lee Hildebrand said that in Bey’s seven-and-a-half-minute rendition of John Lennon’s ”Imagine,” the singer “cuts to the heart-wrenching song’s emotional core with his muscular baritone voice, taking his time with the lyrics, adding back-of-the-throat grit In just the right places.” The positive response to You Don’t Know Nothing led Blue Dot Records to quickly issue a follow-up CD, Soul for Your Blues, recorded in December 2012 at guitarist Kid Andersen’s San Jose, California, studio and again produced by Paule. The same world-class musicians who had helped make You Don’t Know Nothing such an artistic triumph — Paule, keyboardist Tony Lufrano, bassist Paul Olguin, drummer Paul Revelli, trumpeter Steffen Kuehn, trombonist Mike Rinta, and saxophonist Nancy Wright — returned for Soul for Your Blues. They’re augmented on two tracks by harmonica ace Rick Estrin. Andersen, currently a member of Estrin’s Nightcats, contributed second guitar parts to three songs and clavinet to one, and a vocal trio added backup harmonies to four. Unlike You Don’t Know Nothing, which was made up entirely of tunes that had previously been recorded by others, Soul for Your Blues includes seven numbers that were written especially for Bey, six of them by Paule and his wife Christine Vitale, and one by Jeff Monjack, the guitarist in Bey’s Philadelphia group, the Swing City Blues Band. The four cover songs were especially well chosen: the Willie Mitchell composition “I Don’t Know Why” that was originally recorded by O.V. Wright, Wynonie Harris’ “Buzzard Luck,” Percy Mayfield’s “Nothing Stays the Same Forever” (given a funeral procession flavor courtesy of Rinta’s tuba and Rivelli’s snare drum), and John Prine’s “Hello in There” (reinvented by Bey and the band in a gripping reading akin to their earlier recording of “Imagine”). And, as he had on the previous album, Bey stepped aside to let the spotlight shine on Paule for two selections. This time around the guitarist plays a funky soul original titled “Smokehouse” and a swinging instrumental treatment of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” “Frank puts his entire being into a song,” Paule says of the singer, to whom he was introduced eight years ago by Noel Hayes, a disc jockey at KPOO in San Francisco and the executive producer of both Blue Dot CDs. “He’s not just play acting. When he sings a lyric, he means it from every fiber of his being. He connects with a song and connects with an audience in a very deep and sincere way.” “I like backing a singer,” the guitarist adds. “I don’t like playing long solos and instrumentals. If I hear a great voice that really delivers a song, then I’m in my element and I do whatever it takes to support that vocalist. Playing with Frank is just wonderful that way. I’m doing what I can do really well.” Paule, who was born on December, 21, 1956, in Durban, South Africa, came to Los Angeles at 10-months old, and settled in Northern California when he was 15, has worked with some of the best singers in the business during the past

quarter century. They include Johnny Adams, Brenda Boykin, Earl King, Brownie McGhee, Maria Muldaur, Kim Nalley, Tommy Ridgley, and Boz Scaggs. He spent a dozen years as a member of the Johnny Nocturne Band and also toured with groups led by Muldaur, Scaggs, Mark Hummel, Charlie Musselwhite, and Mitch Woods. His extensive discography includes two albums of his own – 1999’s Big Guitar and 2001’s Hiding in Plain Sight – and two with Home Cookin’, a band that featured Boykin. Besides backing Bey when he’s in California, Paule is currently a member of the Hound Kings, an acoustic trio that features blues singer Alabama Mike. Frank Bey was born on January 17, 1946, in Millen, Georgia, located 42 miles south of Augusta. He was the seventh of gospel singer Maggie Jordan’s 12 children. He began singing in church at age 4 with the Rising Son Gospel Singers, a group that included his older brother Robert and two female cousins. They soon had radio programs of their own on two stations in the Augusta area. He also sang with his mother, often at local concerts with such gospel stars as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, Harmonizing Four, Soul Stirrers (then including Sam Cooke), and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He remembers Brother Joe May, the Abraham Brothers, and the Swanee Quintet coming to the house on Sunday afternoons for his mother’s fried chicken. “The kitchen would be full of singers eating fried chicken,” he recalls. “That was cool, but me and my brother couldn’t eat until after they finished. You’d stand and watch them eat all the best parts.” At 14, Frank began singing with Robert Sharpe and the Untouchables, a local R&B band. He had to sneak out of the house to do it because his mother didn’t approve of secular music. At 17, he moved to Philadelphia to work as a driver for his friend Gene Lawson, Otis Redding’s advance publicity man. (Lawson also co-wrote the song “Free Me” with Redding.) Redding often rode in the backseat, and on occasion, when one of Redding’s opening acts didn’t show up on time, Frank was asked to open. Later in the ‘60s, Bey led a racially integrated band called Modern Mixes that performed throughout the eastern regions of Canada and the United States. From 1973 to ’77, he was a featured vocalist with Moorish Vanguard, a large soul band that recorded one single for Polydor but broke up due to dissention within the group over a dispute with the label and James Brown, who claimed producer’s credit. Bey’s band mates stranded him in Florida and left him so devastated that he stopped singing for 17 years. He returned to Philadelphia, where he became a building contractor and opened a seafood restaurant and bar. He eventually resumed performing at the restaurant and later at Warm Daddy’s, the Philadelphia club at which Noel Hayes first encountered him in 1999. Bey had recorded his first CD, Steppin’ Out on his own Magg label, in 1996, but ill health prevented him from properly promoting it. The singer spent over four years on kidney dialysis before receiving a transplant. Though weakened, Bey never stopped performing throughout the ordeal. He recorded his second CD, Blues in the Pocket for Jeffhouse Records in Philadelphia. A year later Hayes first brought him to San Francisco to work with Anthony Paule. “When I got there,” Bey says of his 2006 debut gig with Paule’s band in San Francisco, “it was like I’d been playing with them all the time. I’d never worked with a group of people that worked that well in harmony with one another. It was magical.” Bey credits having sung gospel music as a child and watching Otis Redding perform night after night with influencing his ability to deliver songs with deeply personal conviction. “There’s an old saying,” he explains, “that says, ‘For a man to know, he must himself be what he knows.’ I look for that in a song. If there’s lyrics that I can apply to myself, I can put myself in that setting and sing that song.” Frank Bey succeeds in bringing such heartfelt passion to all 11 of the tunes to which he applies his richly resonant pipes on Soul for Your Blues. Contact: Christine Vitale [email protected] www.christinevitale.com 707-255-2051 www.beypaule.com