The
fills.
That's why Charlie Baty started really playing the guitar. In the early 1970s, when he met singer, songwriter, and harmonica player Rick Estrin, "I had never played guitar in a band," Baty said in a recent phone interview.
At that time, Charlie was the singer and harmonica player in his own band, Little Charlie & the Nightcats. But with Rick already an accomplished harmonica player and set to join the band, Charlie picked up his guitar and studied his Chicago blues heroes.
"What prompted me to try to learn how to play the guitar were the fills, the embellishments I heard behind the harmonica, behind guys like Little Walter or Sonny Boy," he said. "That was just as interesting to me as the harmonica itself. If you wanted to sound right on the harmonica, somebody needed to play those embellishments." So Charlie obsessively listened to the guitars behind the harmonicas - Robert Lockwood, Louis Myers, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy.
After more than 30 years of Little Charlie & the Nightcats - who will perform on Tuesday, March 27, at the Isle of Capri Casino in Bettendorf - he and Rick "have a great friendship with a lot of mutual respect," said Charlie. "I'm sure he's tired of people calling him Little Charlie. I don't mind the fact that he's up there talking and singing. I'm perfectly happy to be in the background playing the guitar - the fills, punctuating the rhythm."
Giving credit to the rhythm section, Charlie said that the current configuration of the Nightcats "is the best version of the band we've ever had." Drummer J. Hansen and bassist Lorenzo Farrell have been with the Nightcats for four years, including playing on the group's latest release, Nine Lives.
Hansen and Farrell are veterans of the Bay Area's Steve Lucky & the Rhumba Bums. Hansen has also toured with members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Farrell is known in the San Francisco jazz scene as being adept at performing and composing Brazilian and big-band jazz.
"Not many blues bands can play the range of music we play," Charlie noted. Hansen and Farrell "play all these different styles with equal authority." Those different styles include Chicago blues, bebop, rockabilly, western swing, jazz.
"I have a wide taste in music," said Charlie, "and Rick's tastes go off in different directions than mine; he's more vocally oriented, everything from cry-in-your-beer country & western to gospel to the Coasters. We bring all these different combinations and tastes to the table and try to accommodate everybody's styles, and we come up with what we do."
What Little Charlie and the Nightcats do best is present an unmatchable live show, so jaw-dropping that they upstaged the following act, headliners The Fabulous Thunderbirds, at the 2002 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival.
Both Charlie and Rick prefer the energy and theatrics of playing live to recording, although "over the years, we've learned how to make the records be more like playing live," Rick said. "That's when we're at our best. We're a pretty spontaneous band."
They perform live without a set list, so the band has to be ready for anything that Charlie calls out from their extensive repertoire. "I enjoy the moment of it," Charlie said. "I like the intimacy of the small clubs; you can be more varied in your approach to things, take more chances. ... Spontaneity is one of the things that makes our band special."
With his eclectic tastes, Charlie goes through phases of absorbing different styles. At one point he was listening to "swing guys like Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel," then rockabilly or western swing or a certain kind of blues, Charlie Parker, or even polka. Right now Charlie's on a Django Reinhardt roll; his MP3 player has everything the great gypsy-jazz guitarist ever did and that's all it has on it, "because there's something in the soul of it that really reaches out to me. ... Years ago, I did that with the blues. Like Little Walter - I listened to all his records. Everything I do is based on that early blues foundation."
Little Walter Jacobs was also Rick's primary influence for harmonica playing, along with both Sonny Boys (John Lee Williamson and Rice Miller) and James Cotton. "I just decided I was going to learn this, and I got very focused," said Rick. "I wasn't doing much else once I quit going to high school: playing harp or looking for trouble."
That's Rick's wise guy coming out, a frequent trait of the characters in the songs he writes. Just listen to any one of the many wry narrative voices Rick has invented on Nine Lives: "There's just one kind of chick that I strictly avoid - unemployed!" from "Got to Have a Job," or "If you haven't got a clue, nothing is the thing to do" from "Don't Cha Do Nothin'."
"I love songwriting," Rick said," because you can keep fine-tuning it and get it just exactly how you want it before anybody sees it. Editing is a big part."
In 1993 Rick received a Blues Music Award for Best Song for "My Next Ex-Wife," and his songs have been covered by Koko Taylor, John Hammond ("Homely Girl"), and Robert Cray. "It's one of the most gratifying things," Rick noted, "to get that kind of validation from artists with that much credibility."
Rick was also lucky that he got songwriting encouragement early on. His mentor, songwriter Roger Collins (who wrote "She's Lookin' Good," a Wilson Pickett hit), "would always tell me to keep my ears open; he'd put in songs while we were riding and point out things - it was like having a personal teacher."
In the early '80s, before the Nightcats began recording, Rick brought one of his songs to a club owner to listen to. Appearing at the club that night was noted songwriter Percy Mayfield - "the poet of the blues" who wrote "Hit the Road Jack" and "Please Send Me Someone to Love." He overheard Rick's song and began singing along. The two eventually became friends. "Just having him give me his stamp of approval and legitimacy was gratifying and encouraging to me," Rick said.
When he writes songs, Rick often starts with just a phrase, a title, or an idea that has "an intrinsic rhythm to it, the way it speaks, that suggests a riff or a melody or a certain groove. I'll sit down with the guitar and try to come up with a melody that goes along with this subject, idea, or catchphrase, then try to hammer out a lyric, try to make it say something that's interesting that people can identify with. I watch people pretty closely, I listen to what people say, and I observe how people behave - I try to find subjects that have a commonality in the human condition."
Rick's stories distinguish the Nightcats - "I can come up with these lyrics that are a little bit different than a whole lotta people," he said - but he noted that Charlie's "a great guitar player, and I'm lucky to have hooked up with him."
Charlie is noted for his seemingly impossible guitar excursions, dizzying in their diversity and technical skill. From jazz to Chicago blues to West Coast swing and rockabilly, Charlie seamlessly blends various elements into a guitar sound that is his alone. "Little Charlie Baty plays as much guitar as Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy put together," raved The Village Voice. "He is one of the most fluent guitarists working in any genre."
"Charlie's a real driven guy as well as being a creative, wild, spontaneous guitar player," Rick said.
"The thing that drives me," Charlie said, "is that I want to be as good as I can possibly be - to be able to play all the styles I like with equal ability, the right style at the right time. I'm not done yet."
Little Charlie & the Nightcats will appear Tuesday, March 27 at the Caribbean Cove Lounge of the Isle of Capri Casino in Bettendorf. The music begins at 7 p.m. Advanced tickets are $12, or $10 for Mississippi Valley Blues Society members, and are available at the MVBS office at 102 South Harrison Street in Davenport from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays.
