Back In The Swing

Back In The Swing

Southwest Airlines SPIRIT Magazine

February 1998

By Ellise Pierce

In the cavernous foyer of Chicago’s Field Museum, the black tie attired crowd is bobbing up and down on the dance floor like Halloween apples in a barrel. En Masse, they look like yuppie soup – girls with Jennifer Anniston hair swishing across their cheeks and guys with thick necks and slightly misshapen barber cuts, looking quintessentially Midwest. They hold one another and awkwardly swirl around in their rented tuxes and just-bought dresses, nearly all of them mouthing the words to the songs they spin.

Buzz, buzz ,buzz, will you be my Honey?

Buzz, buzz, buzz, I’ll be your little bee,

Buzz, buzz, buzz, will you be my Honey?

I’ll buzz, buzz, buzz, ‘til you belong to me.

But the real buzz tonight is the band, and the reason why most of the audience have come out for this $65 per person charity event – the Mighty Blue Kings, a home-grown swingin’, jump-jive band whose jazzy, bluesy, big band sounds are on the verge of blasting past the borders of local stardom. While their first CD, Meet e in Uptown (R-Jay Records), cracked a local Tower Records top-twenty list, they’ve been playing to sold-out, standing room only crowds from Los Angeles to New York City.

Together for just two years, the Mighty Blue Kings have opened for Tine Turner and Pete Townsend, played at Johnny Depp’s terminally hip Viper Room in West Hollywood, toured Ireland, and are featured in David Schwimmer’s movie, Kissing a Fool, to be released this year. Schwimmer, a big fan since he heard them play at The Green Mill, bought fifteen CDs and created a spot for them in his new film. Other celeb fans include Oprah Winfrey, Sandra Bullock, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Costner, and Marisa Tomei.

Give a listen, and you’ll see why. The band has a fresh, clean sound, complete with saxophones and steel brushes across an aqua drum set – retro but recharged Nineties.

“The kind of music they represent has a lot of roots in Chicago – R&B, blues, and Chicago blues – and it’s a highly exportable commodity,” says Howard Reich, jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune. That’s why they’ve built up an incredible following. It’s music that people are comfortable with.”

The Mighty Blue Kings are led by crooner Ross Bon, who’s the undisputed force behind the group. As he sings “Put Your Hand In Mine,” Bon’s baritone voice pours over the crowd like chocolate: full, rich, and thick. One by one, women leave their dates and line up near the stage and swoon. Little wonde. He’s not just handsome; there’s something, well, Cary Grantish about the guy. Wearing a vintage suit on his battleship shoulders and six-foot frame, and slicked –back hair with an impetuous curl that falls every now and then into his soft brown eyes, he’s downright dreamy, you might say. If that is, you are Doris Day.

The next day, over a late lunch at a Chicago vegetarian restaurant Bon shows no signs of the all-nighter he pulled after the band’s three hour set, putting the last touches on their new CD, Come One, Come All (R-Jay Records), which was released in November 1997. Out of vintage clothes and in jeans, a khaki shirt, and sleek black horn-rims, his voice still has that late-night quality, like it was formed from many years of smoky bars and last-call whiskeys.

But he’s just twenty-five. And he has been singing for only six years. He assembled the band from jazz and blues musicians that he met while hanging out in Chicago clubs – the oldest member of the band is thirty, the rest are in their twenties.

“ A lot of our appeal is we are all young and we have a young audience, but to me, what we do is for everybody. People come up and say, ‘Oh my kids would love this,’ My parents would love this,’ I teach second grade class, and my kids know all the words to Rag Mop,’ says Bon. “That’s amazing.”

Let’s get this straight. The Mighty Blue Kings swing, but don’t call themselves a swing band. Trendy is not what they want to be.

“The swing scene bothers me because that’s not what this music is about,” says Bon between bites of a spinach salad. “I want to really try and touch people with songs that they can relate to; it’s not this ‘Hey, daddy-o’ kind of thing,” he says, twirling his finger in the air for emphasis. “It’ fun. It’s a struggle for us because I don’t want to be a part of a scene – the grunge scene was here, the rap scene was here, the punk scene was here and where are they now? They’re gone. Give me fifteen years and I’ll be forty, and I’ll be playing music. That is what we do.”

What the Mighty Blue Kings do is give a good show. While the band’s audience translate in CD form, one gig will convince you that these guys love what they’re doing.

“I think any great musician that’s out there has a great entertainment quality about them, and I like to play music for people that musicians can enjoy as well,” says Bon. I’m serious about the music that we play. I think people like our shows because we’re just not up there ‘wakka-wakka-wakka.’ We’re having a good time.”

Bon, the fifth of seven children spent much of his childhood on Chicago’s South Side listening to music his older siblings played – the Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Van Halen, and Bad Company, all blues based bands – but it wasn’t until he enrolled in junior college at nineteen that his interest in music began to develop.

He started going to Checkerboard, a legendary Chicago blues bar, every Tuesday night to listen to the post-war Chicago blues sounds of Buddy Scott, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells. Every Tuesday became every Tuesday and Thursday, and soon every night of the week he was driving from the suburbs into the city to listen and hang out with the musicians. At the same time, he was teaching himself to play the harmonica at home.

“I picked it up on my own, listening and imitating other players,” he says. “It was the same with my singing. I listened to Jimmy Witherspoon, Joe Williams, etc, and I would imitate their styles to develop my own.”

He went on the road with a band that needed a harmonica player, but when the touring gig was over, Bon began to play and sing wherever he could find a gig. When he wasn’t playing, he’d work construction jobs to make ends meet.

Along the way, Bon met up with bass player Jimmy Sutton, whose interest in jazz and blues were similar to his own, and the two decided to form a band – The Mighty Blue Kings. (Sutton has since left the band.)

Then, he put an ad in the paper advertising for other musicians, which is how saxophone player and drummer Jerry DeVivo became part of the group. When Bon heard him warming up, he signed DeVivo up immediately.

“Either people click or they don’t,” says DeVivo. ‘It’s like trying to make a relationship work. There’s got to be chemistry there; you can’t force it.”

At the time DeVivo was enrolled in jazz a studies program at a small college outside of Chicago and was waiting tables, working as a part time police officer, and practicing sometimes for as much as seven hours a day. But he loved what he heard with the newly formed group, and he found time to rehearse with them, too. After about a year of juggling jobs, music, and school, he realized that it would be impossible to maintain his 3.75 grade point average. DeVivo eventually left the other jobs and put school on hold.

What he shares with the other members is a passion for the music they’re playing and a dedication to growing musically as a band. “We’re trying to build a future,” he says. “We absolutely, 200 percent, believe in what we’re doing If I don’t believe in what I’m doing, then why should you believe it?

They began playing to small Tuesday-night crowds at The Green Mill Jazz Club, one of Chicago’s oldest speakeasies, but soon the word spread.

“You couldn’t get a seat in The Green Mill unless you were forty-five minutes early,” says jazz critic Reich. “People are so hungry for that positive attitude…. I think the Mighty Blue Kings convey an excitement and an optimism that you just don’t usually encounter in pop music these days. It’s become sort of fashionable to be dour and dark and angry, and these guys aren’t afraid to offer something else. And people responded to that immediately.”

What they played then was much like the mix that appears on the first CD – original materials written by Bon, as well as Percy Mayfield, Jimmy Lunceford, and Sonn Rollins covers.

“My goal as a band would be to play everything from Muddy Waters to John Coltrane, which is a pretty big goal, but at the same time, we’re achieving small bits at a time,” says Bon. “That’s what the band’s about. It’s about playing American music.”

Although Bon writes much of the music the band plays, according to DeVivo Bon welcomes input from the other members but has the final say.

“Is Bon a perfectionist?” says DeVivo. “Oh, yeah but so am I. If it ain’t right, I don’t want my name on it either. You have no business calling yourself a professional if you’re not a perfectionist.”

Two months later, on Saturday night at Cubby Bear, a 1,200-capacity sports bar, a standing room only crowd of mostly twenty somethings swills long neck beer purchased at various troughs set up around the club to serve the masses. They are wearing jeans and flannel shirts, twin sets in cotton-candy colors, and hair to both men and women, with a bit too much spray.

Most are no doubt regulars of the bar, which caters to fans of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, but tonight they’re here to cheer on the Mighty Blue Kings in celebration of the release of their new CD.

It’s 12:30 a.m. when Bon and the band take the stage, surrounded by a thick wall of adoring girls, many of whom have pushed their boyfriends a row or two back.

As Bon claps his huge cymal hands, the audience, like an eager congregation, awaits its next cue. They sing along softly with him when he asks them to and fill in the chorus on other numbers.

It’s totally interactive. Tonight, there is no dancing, simply because there is no room. At 2:30, after the band has played every song in its repertoire, Bon breaks into a wide grin and says breathlessly, “Goodnight, Chicago. It’s good to be home.” He pushes his curls back off his face and leaves the stage.

Meanwhile as the crowd begins to disperse, a few couples clasp hands and start to dance, sliding effortlessly and perhaps unknowingly across puddles of spilled brew on the concrete floor.

The Mighty Blue Kings will do that to you.