Charles Brown’s Christmas
When a young singer and pianist named Charles Brown was hired in 1944 to play at Ivie’s Chicken Shack, the legendary jazz singer Ivie Anderson’s nightclub in Los Angeles, he was instructed to play ‘nothing degrading like the blues’. It wasn’t an admonition that he heeded very long. The blues didn’t degrade him. He elevated them. After Brown died in 1999, Bonnie Raitt, who toured with him starting in 1987, deemed him ‘the most extraordinary piano player I’ve ever heard’, noting that he ‘led the West Coast blues explosion’. Indeed he did.
