What: Steve Hill
When: Friday, 8:30 p.m. (doors at 8)
Venue: Tally Ho Sports Bar & Grill, 3020 Douglas St.
Tickets: $19 at the Victoria Jazz Society office (202-345 Quebec St.), Lyle’s Place, the Tally Ho Sports Bar & Grill, the Royal McPherson box office or rmts.bc.ca; $22 at the door
Note: Hill also performs Saturday at the Queen’s Hotel in Nanaimo
Steve Hill has the outward appearance of a legit rock ’n’ roller, from his long, Gregg Allman-like hair and healthy beard to his whisky-and-cigarettes rasp. Yet he continues to gain recognition as one of this country’s foremost bluesmen.
There’s good reason for that, even if Hill would rather be described as someone who plays “guitar music.”
This year, Hill took home four Maple Blues Awards, including entertainer of the year and guitar player of the year. In March, his recording Solo Recordings Volume 2 won a Juno Award for blues album of the year. Its predecessor, 2012’s Solo Recordings Volume 1, was nominated for a Juno and earned album of the year honours at the International Blues Challenge.
Remarkably, the Montrealer has done it all by himself. Following a muted response to his 2011 album Whiplash Love, his sixth album with a full band, he decided to chart a new course.
“I’ve been a one-man band ever since,” Hill said.
He’s not technically alone as he travels across Canada — “I’ve got a sound man and a roadie,” Hill noted — but it will be just him on stage when he performs Friday at the Tally Ho, his first concert in Victoria since 1999.
There’s a downside to his type of solo setup, Hill admitted. “If something f---ed up [in the past], I could usually blame the bass player or the drummer,” he said with a laugh. “I can’t now. So I just blame somebody from the crew.”
Hill, who stands when he performs, is now the bass player and the drummer — in addition to being the singer, guitarist and harmonica player. It took him a while to get comfortable in his new guise. At first, he was just playing guitar and stomping his foot to get his point across. He eventually incorporated a bass drum and hi-hat for the purpose of recording Volume 1, and never looked back.
“It’s not the typical one-man band that you imagine, with the bass drum in the back and a hi-hat on my head and a little monkey on the side. It’s a different thing.”
He played 175 shows to support his first solo endeavour. His pace hasn’t lessened since, nor has the tinkering over his setup.
“I keep adding stuff. At some point, I wanted a backbeat, so I got a snare [drum] with a pedal, and then I got the idea of having the drumstick holder on my guitar’s headstock, so there’s now a drumstick I play the cymbal and hi-hat with. I’ve modified my guitar so you actually hear the bass a lot of the time, because I’m playing bass with my thumb through an extra [guitar] pickup that goes through an octave pedal and a Fender bass amp. It sounds like a band now.”
The manner in which he plays on stage carries over the way in which he records, and vice versa, Hill said. When he records in the studio, he does so live to tape. “I don’t do overdubs.”
That gives his music a ragged feel, something he has been attracted to since he was young, when he first heard Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. YouTube is full of videos that show Hill ripping away at his guitar, constantly in motion as his feet work the percussion. A particularly impressive clip is the one that shows him performing Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile at last year’s Montreal Jazz Festival, an incredibly powerful performance before a hometown crowd.
Fans in Quebec and Ontario, where Hill has spent the bulk of his career, are used to seeing him rip stages apart with tributes to the classic rock legends. His fondness for rock-guitar greats of the 1960s and ’70s is well-established out East, which is why his reputation as a dyed-in-the-wool blues singer elsewhere in the country strikes him as odd.
“I’m known as a blues artist, but for a long time I was known as a rock ’n’ roll artist. I mix it all up. I write songs. They are bluesy, but there’s a rock ’n’ roll element to it, or sometimes a country element to it. It’s all music, and it’s all the same three chords, but I try to do something different with it.”
He doesn’t spend much time trying to lay out the differences between what he does and the music of his blues compatriots in Canada, many of whom are his close friends. Those who know him well know where his allegiance lies. “I think a lot of my fans don’t necessarily go and see a lot of blues shows. If I go to a Black Sabbath show, or a Slash show, or a ZZ Top show, people will know me. Rock fans in Quebec like what I do.”
