SELWYN BIRCHWOOD continually gravitated in the direction of song, whether he found out it or no longer.
“I type of continually knew I appreciated track, I just didn’t recognise that I desired to play an device,” Birchwood tells us ahead of his Sep. 22 overall performance at Coach’s Corner for the Savannah Jazz Festival.
“Being a kid, I constantly liked the track in cartoons I become watching. I can look returned now and say, ‘Wow, I constantly liked that stuff.’ Specifically blues song, even when I didn’t understand whilst it become. I appearance lower back on extraordinary films; stuff that I’d watch as a child. I consider watching Back to the Future and seeing Michael J. Fox playing a Chuck Berry song.”
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When he become 13 years antique, Birchwood started gambling guitar and observed Jimi Hendrix no longer long after.
“It absolutely turned my global the other way up,” he says.
“I said, ‘I need to know what this is.’ It gave the impression of alien track to me. I hadn’t heard some thing adore it. I experience like a variety of humans leap on Hendrix stuff and want to play like him, however I became simply amazed with the aid of the creativity of it. Hendrix is in a genre all to himself. You can’t simply put him a field.”
Hendrix changed into the turning factor for Birchwood, who determined to start digging deeper into the mythical guitarist’s influences to determine out in which his imaginative sound originated from.
“I stated, ‘Man, what could encourage someone to write down these things?’ I commenced searching lower back and he’s were given all the vintage blues men in his bio. Muddy Waters, Elmore James—I started choosing up records from all the men he cited in his bio, and I located the sound I’d been searching out,” he says.
“I stated, ‘Man, that is superb.’ Buddy Guy become coming to city within weeks of locating out about him, and I went to move see him but didn’t actually recognize whatever approximately him. I become completely floored. I stated, ‘Whatever that is that I’m experiencing, that’s what I want to examine. That’s it for me. I located my calling at that point.”
Since then, Birchwood has honed his personal sound that is rooted inside the Hendrix tune as well as pioneers of blues that he turned into enamored with. As a guitar player, Birchwood says he’s usually growing his sound and exploring the confines of the genre.
“I’m still looking to parent it out, but the quit purpose is to locate my personal sound,” he expresses. “Especially nowadays in blues song, each person wants to cover those Muddy Waters songs and Willie Dixon songs and stuff. But that’s now not what they were doing. Willie Dixon turned into a prolific songwriter. It doesn’t make experience to me that people miss songwriting. So that’s always been my intention—even if I changed into first getting to know, I’d examine a song and then try to make my personal track from there.”
These days, Birchwood has garnered vital approval for his method to songwriting and gambling, and being rightfully lauded as an artist to observe. The Alligator Records artist apparently has no plans to slow down as he ushers inside the next era of blues—setting his personal stamp on it, even as reminiscent of the players who paved the way.