G. Love and Special Sauce, a Boston-based trio whose raw, unabashed style has caught the attention of the hip-hop industry, will perform at Webster Hall this Friday at 8 p.m.
Blending a strong blues influence with the lively rhythms of hip-hop, G. Love and Special Sauce has quickly become one of the most innovative new bands around.
While it has become commonplace for rappers to infuse samples from jazz tracks into their songs, G. Love carries the trend a step further.
The group, including G. Love (guitars, harmonica, vocals), Jeffrey Clemens (drums) and Jimmy Prescott (acoustic bass), is essentially a rhythm section which relies solely on the acoustic effect rather than samples.
The band was discovered by Michael Caplan, Epic Record's talent executive, who immediately knew this was the group needed to restart the classic blues label, Okeh.
He saw that G. Love's sound was stretching the blues idiom to unprecedented limits, a trend that was bound to attract attention. "The blues should be more about a frame of mind than a particular form. ... To [some], the idea of rap and blues is so bizarre. But to a 21-year old, it's real natural," Caplain said in an interview with the Philadelphia Enquirer.
G. Love's (Garrett Dutton III) songs have the soulful feeling of classic blues with formidable rhythmic backup from Prescott and Clemens. Opting for solidity and consistency rather than flashiness, the bassist and drummer round out the group perfectly, enhancing Love's lyrics with a fiesty, wide-open beat derived from New Orleans second line rhythm.
Simplicity is the backbone of this group and probably the key to its recent success. Dutton plays the electric guitar with plenty of enthusiasm, but without any complicated progressions.
"I don't want to impress people. I don't want people to stand there either. When I see them swaying side to side, I know we're getting it right," Dutton said.
He is by no means a virtuoso on the guitar, but he doesn't have to be. He plays his music as well as he needs to, staying true to traditional blues numbers, which stressed emotional content over technical facility.
Influenced primarily by bluesmen such as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, Dutton cites classic blues tunes as well as early hip-hop as his inspirations. The band's music however, is somewhat happier and jauntier than conventional blues, adding yet another suprise to their overall sound.
"Throughout history, the white music has been considered the classical music, and the black music has been the folk music. We're treating the blues with that classical respect," Dutton said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
Their self-titled debut album on the newly revived Okeh label gave audiences their first experience of the urgent, spicy sound of the band. With plenty of frenzied solo passages and Dutton's rhythm riffs, the group especially shines on "Shooting Hoops," "Blues Music," "Baby's Got Sauce" and "Rhyme for the Summertime."
The group's music, which is made up of a solid set of drums, a simply plucked acoustic bass and a lounging guitar, reflects G. Love's relaxed rap style.
In reforming the blues and rap, the band has retained the lyricism present in the blues and blended it with infectious hip-hop rhythms. The resulting sound is truly unconventional, sounding like nothing that has emerged from the rap or hip-hop scene in the past few years.
Tickets for Friday night's concert are available at the Collis Center infodesk. They are $7 for Dartmouth students and $10 for the general public.
