2001 Kinzel & Hyde won Best Traditional Blues Act
Article Reprint from the December, 2001 BluesNotes
Article by Greg Johnson
There has always been a lifelong interest for music with Stu Kinzel, including an overwhelming infatuation with the guitar. A professional performer for more than 25 years and a music teacher, he still considers himself a student of the instrument to this day.
Stuart Kinzel grew up on Portland's west side, the youngest in his family. Music was always around him. His father, an avid Jazz fan, owned a lot of Louis Armstrong recordings and there was something about them that told Stu he liked what he heard. The record collections of his siblings also proved to be grounds for his curiosity. He remembers one year his sister coming home from college, bringing with her LPs of B.B. King and Mississippi John Hurt. It was a revelation for the young Stu, as he would invade their collections, delving deeper into the music.
Like most people of his generation, Stu first gained exposure to
the Blues from British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.
Scanning LP jacket liners notes, names like McKinley Morganfield
and Chester Burnet, often popped up. But, Blues in itself
was something that was seldom heard on Portland radio and many of these names
remained mysterious to a young listener eager to find out more. But, that
was soon to change. Never much of a sleeper, Stu would often sit
up at nights listening to a short wave radio. When he discovered stations from
as far away as Texas, it was there that he truly discovered the sounds of the
Blues. Now, people like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf
began to make sense to him and others like Albert King, B.B.
King and Freddie King grasped a strong hold on him, too.
The Kinzel family owned a piano and young Stu would play on it incessantly by the age of nine. "I just drove everybody nuts with that," he states. He also received his first acoustic guitar, a Martin, when he was 10. Stu would play music endlessly. His father believed that it might actually be quieter if he bought Stu an electric guitar. But, the error of this idea soon became apparent as Stu and his brother wired the guitar up through some tubed stereo equipment. "It shattered their illusions of not having to listen to it," Stu recalls with a smile.
His parents were very supportive of his guitar playing and he did take a lot of lessons. There have always been a number of great guitarists living in the Portland area and Stu took classes from a number of them. His first teacher was impressed with Stu's Martin and actually wanted to buy it from him. Many of these teachers were elder Jazz musicians, some of them excellent instructors; some of them were more like, "Hey kid. play `Satin Doll'," which was a long way from where Stu wanted to go with his playing.
The first musician he ever saw perform live was B.B. King in 1971 when he was about 12, after which, the sounds of King's guitar would keep him up at night even more than before. Most likely unknown to his family at the time, Stu would sit up for hours with his electric guitar unplugged trying to figure out licks of King or Muddy Waters. He desired more exposure to the music and soon he was entranced with seeing these performers live. Over the years, he would seldom miss anybody that came through Portland, and he would often travel to Eugene as well. There were many shows held in the city parks during the 1970s, in places like Mt. Tabor or the old zoo's elephant cages in Washington Park. Bands like Canned Heat, and local favorite, Brown Sugar, were very much an influence.
Perhaps the first person who really caught his attention live, though, was Leo Kottke. The guitarist would occasionally play at Portland State's Smith Ballroom in the early '70s and his acoustic work impressed Stu enough that he immediately bought himself a 12-string guitar. Kottke's string-work was amazing, combined with a hilarious sense of humor. And, he would reference other artists in his shows, particularly Doc Watson. This also piqued Stu's interest and he began to buy albums by Watson. The songs he heard on these, such as "Sitting On Top Of The World," took the same effect as those earlier British Blues covers. And, as he had sought out the Chicago musicians after listening to the British players, he now was seeking the works of Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Robert Johnson.
Blues music, though a major inspiration, was not the only form that caught young Stu's ear. Other musicians he would emulate were Merle Travis and Chet Atkins with their huge bass-line grooves. "Some of it's real corndog," Stu notes, "but if you're a guitar player, how can you not like it?"
But, it was Robert Johnson that Stu found to be the most challenging music to play. "That's pretty scary stuff. At first when you listen to him it sounds an if there are two or three guitarists there. But, once you start to break it down, you can see there is only one. I could never master his music note-for-note, I could only do versions of his songs. I kind of gave up. There's a lot of interesting things going on with something like the Chess Records stuff, where there is often no bass player. You have three guitarists, all doing their parts seamlessly so that you don't hear that. But, with Johnson, you have the same effect, but it's only one guy."
Yet, even with Johnson's haunting tunes, combined with what he heard from Broonzy, Travis, Atkins and others, Stu thought to himself that if he practiced these songs he could do it himself without having to rely on others in a band setting. So, he studied their arrangement differences, and the layout of the bass lines and melodies. It takes discipline to accomplish this, but he was up for the challenge.
After high school, Stu worked in a number of guitar shops and played in several bands. He began performing professionally when he was 19, playing with a bunch of guys at the ski resorts around the western United States; places like Sun Valley, Jackson Hole, Snowbird and Mt. Bachelor. He did this for about four years and then returned to Portland, where he met Johnnie Ward.
At the time, Ward was looking to piece together an electric band that eventually became The Jokers. It was a good-sized band, complete with horns. They started out in a club in Northwest Portland known as The Knobby Tavern where The Jokers began to develop a following in the area and Stu was enjoying his time with them. It also gave him the opportunity to open for a number of national acts, including John Lee Hooker and Lonnie Brooks, at places such as The Starry Night and Key Largo. Soon the focus of the band began to turn toward acoustic music and it rekindled an interest within Stu as well.
Johnnie Ward proved to be a wealth of knowledge for Stu. He started to hang out more with Johnnie, listening to old records, talking about the music and fooling around with their guitars. "Johnnie probably knows more songs that aren't even on record. He's so versatile. He can do old Jazz, jug bands, standards and he knows a million Blues tunes and Hank Williams songs, too. I learned a lot of forms and things that I don't think I would have ever bothered with until I met Johnnie. With him it was more like, `Well, you better learn this stuff kid, because you're going to be playing it."
Stu continued playing with Johnnie Ward and a number
of other people until about five years ago. At that point, he told himself,
"You know, I can kind of sing and I want to play what I want."
He no longer wanted to be just the guitar guy in somebody else's band at the
mercy of what others wanted to play. It was about that time he began to
perform with LynnAnn
Hyde. "Her interest in traditional music has been real
good for me. She is one of the few harmonica players that I have ever
known who knows a lot about things you wouldn't expect from a harmonica
player. Johnnie Ward and her are the only two who come to
mind. Once you get away from a 12-bar form, they're not lost; they can see
that there are plenty of things for them to do without running into
anything." And she makes him practice, too.
One of the new experiences that Lynn became involved with was the Blues In Schools programs. It has been something that Stu has enjoyed being a part of as well. In order to perform Blues before a grade school setting, it takes a lot of play list editing to avoid songs that speak of the world's vices. It made him look at Folk songs a little harder than he had before and he found himself researching people like Leadbelly. Good material that he always had known, but had never really thought about performing before. "It's a lot of fun playing before an audience that's so young and not in a barroom setting," Stu says. "It's good to do these things and more people should do it."
Performing Blues music in the schools is not Stu's only means of educating others. He is also a guitar instructor at Hillsboro Music, mostly on an intermediate level. A lot of guitar teachers have a set lesson plan, but that's not Stu's style. He teaches the root forms of the music, real basic stuff. "You've got to learn to walk before you can run," he says. A number of students come to him with an interest in playing slide and bottleneck styles of guitar, something that holds it's own place in his heart as an avid fan of Elmore James. Other students may need work developing right hand skills. No matter what they seek to learn, Stu always instills how to break the guitar down, much like playing a piano. "You need to break it down in order to approach it." It goes back full-circle to his long nights as a teenager working out the different sounds he heard over the radio.
Lately, LynnAnn and Stu have been working consistently, gaining a large fan base in the Portland area. For the second year in a row, they were nominated as "Best Traditional Act" at the Cascade Blues Association's annual "Muddy Awards", winning the award this year. Stu was also nominated as "Best Acoustic Guitarist", alongside long-time favorites, Alan Hager and Terry Robb, two artists he has always respected. The duo has also been working on a new CD, including some numbers featuring a band setting. It will all be original material written by Kinzel and Hyde, recorded in a live format and it looks to be a somewhat eclectic mixture. "There's some jug band-type stuff that I've written and a couple of R&B tunes. Some Cajun stuff that Lynn does and more traditional songs in the Country Blues vein. We're just going to spend a lot of time on that and get it going."
Whatever the future holds for Stu Kinzel, one thing is for sure, the guitar is an instrument that he will continue to study. "The guitar is funny," he says, "it's an open-ended instrument; I never really think that I have it. As soon as you think you've got it made, there's always more to learn. And, as far as it goes, I haven't even scratched the surface of what can be done with it. There are so many styles and so many different nuances that people do, that if you hear something, it makes you go, `What is that and how can I do it?" Stu has a gifted car for breaking these sounds down and perhaps someday those elusive Robert Johnson numbers will come to him as well. But, it can be guaranteed, he's not going to give up any time soon.
To contact Stu Kinzel for guitar lessons, he can be reached at Hillsboro Music at (503) 648-5241 or through the Kinzel & Hyde web-site at: www.KinzelAndHyde.com.
© 2001 Cascade Blues Association