Honey Blo
honeyblorecords.com
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Chicago’s (and perhaps the world’s) only blues/funk bagpiper, Honey Blo studied woodwinds with jazz musician Duke Payne when Payne was his math teacher at Betsy Ross Elementary School. When he saw Payne play the bagpipes during a school assembly, he was hooked. “He was teaching and playing music,” he remembers, “and he had all the teachers, the women, after him. So that kind of influenced me when I saw him playing the bagpipes, too. I bought my own bagpipes, and I started doing some lessons with him. I used to see bagpipes with the Irish and Scottish, but I never thought that I would be able to take it to the level that I took it.”
Despite the instrument’s limited tonal and harmonic range, Honey Blo coaxes a remarkable range of taut, sonically intense textures from it, perfectly melding its drone-based modal sound with the blues scale. In his hands, in fact, the pipes sound for all the world as if it they could have originated in Africa and migrated to the New World on slave ships, like the banjo.
