The Blue and Gold pays tribute to the women of early blues, right down to the analog tape
Appearing at the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Ndidi O and Trish Klein forge a partnership after meeting in Paris
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival presents Blue and Gold with Great Aunt Ida on July 2 at Performance Works
AN EARLY-BLUES revival project, The Blue and Gold places a spotlight on female musicians who shaped contemporary culture. In this collaboration between JUNO-nominated vocalist Ndidi Onukwulu and Trish Klein of Vancouver folk band The Be Good Tanyas, The Blue and Gold breathes new life into the heart and soul of classic blues.
Onukwulu and Klein met in Paris after Klein moved there following a messy breakup.
“I was really lonely, and I don’t speak good French at all, so I was really struggling,” Klein recalls in an interview with Stir. “I’d known about Ndidi, and I heard through the grapevine that she was in Paris. We ended up hanging out. We had a lot of good times—that’s how our friendship started.”
“At the time, we talked about collaborating, but we were in different places in our lives: she was still living in Paris for another year after I went back to Canada,” Klein says. “She ended up moving to L.A., and she would come to Vancouver every year or so to visit me. At one point just before the pandemic, we decided to collaborate on a project that would reinterpret early blues.”
Klein explains that Onukwulu wanted to do a retro-blues album, and the pair decided the project would be a good way to stave off “pandemic-lockdown syndrome”.
“We started trading songs, and then I started recording guitar parts and she would send me her vocals and we would put them together,” she says. “We made all these demos that way, and then once we had six demos we decided to make the album.”
Prior to joining the early 2000’s folk outfit The Be Good Tanyas, Klein says she had been focused on pursuing blues.
“Blues music was my first passion when I started playing guitar at 14,” she says. “My first music loves were Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and that music is all based in early blues—specifically female blues musicians that were influential.
“Blues music is a secular music that comes from Black culture, so almost all the musicians in early blues music were Black,” Klein adds. “The lineage of all modern rock music can be traced to early blues women, so we want to recognize the contribution of Black women specifically, because they are so underrecognized and such a marginalized group of people, historically and contemporarily.”
Some of the artists the duo has covered on their soulful, woozily mesmerizing debut album include Sister Rosetta Thorpe, Memphis Minnie, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, among others. Standouts include “Honey in the Rock”, a stirring reinterpretation of Blind Mamie Forehand’s gospel-blues classic (listen below).
The pair’s appreciation of the legacy of the blues is also reflected in The Blue and Gold’s name.
“The root of all modern music goes back to blues; blues contains all kinds of wisdom. Pain, joy, sorrow, the truth—it’s all in the blues,” Klein says. “Gold is timeless and eternal—it never fades, it never degrades, it always shines. It’s the combination of those two things: the wisdom of the blues, the root of everything, and the timelessness and the beauty of gold.”
Their faithfulness to the genre is reflected in many aspects of the duo’s self-titled album—right down to the fact that it was recorded on analog tape.
“Back when blues music was made in the ’60s, they didn’t have digital technology, and often the albums were made in a single day or a couple days,” Klein says. ”These musicians really knew how to play and capture the performances, rather than today, where you do everything possible and just choose bits and pieces, which can also be incredible. To honour the music, we wanted to do it in the traditional style, so we ordered two-inch tape from one of the last companies in North America that makes it, had it shipped here, and recorded it on an analog 16-track tape machine.”
After the release of their debut album in April 2022, The Blue and Gold played a release concert and is now kicking off a multi-festival tour—playing here with bass player Brad Ferguson and drummer Paul Clark at the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Klein says that she hopes to record a future project that combines original songs with covers that didn’t make it onto the first album, while still staying true to the intentions of the project.
“We both really connect to early-blues music—in fact, we don’t like modern blues music. We kind of hate what happened to it,” Klein says. “Blues music became really sterile and stuck in a genre, whereas the roots of early blues music were really fluid.
“We want to revive the early music that is so beautiful and timeless,” she adds. “The direction of this project is to be in the spirit of this music and what we love about it, and honour where the roots of blues music come from, and a lot of that is these early blues women who didn’t get the recognition, even though they hugely influenced the progression of modern music.”
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