Music

Grammy-winning bluesman Negrito going solo in SoMa

Grammy-winning Oakland, Calif.-based bluesman Fantastic Negrito will play a solo show at South on Main tonight.
Grammy-winning Oakland, Calif.-based bluesman Fantastic Negrito will play a solo show at South on Main tonight.

Blues singer Fantastic Negrito knows a little something about starting over. Born Xavier Dphrepaulezz 49 years ago, he was 12 when he moved with his orthodox Muslim family from Massachusetts to Oakland, Calif., and fell under the spell of that city's musical and social culture.

By his 20s, he'd signed a deal with Interscope Records in Los Angeles, but the hits didn't come. To make things worse, a car wreck left him comatose for a month. He eventually moved back to Oakland for a life away from the spotlight.

Fantastic Negrito

8 p.m. today, South on Main, 1304 S. Main St., Little Rock

Admission: $30, $38, $40

(501) 244-9660

metrotix.com

Then the blues called and Fantastic Negrito was born.

"We're all into blues, whether we like it or not," says Negrito, who will perform a solo show tonight at South on Main in Little Rock. "It's basically the father of all popular music. I think I was into it at birth, but not in the sense of listening to it. But the influence was so pervasive and profound in the culture of American music. It's this black roots music that ended up being for everyone, for the entire world."

It was within the past six years or so that he started picking up on the blueprint of his current sonic palette via blues titans such as Skip James, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Son House and Charley Patton.

The Negrito sound is a very much updated version of blues with folk, rock and sly funk interspersed among the standard blues structure -- it would be easy to hear him alongside Alabama Shakes or Benjamin Booker -- and it has picked up critical attention.

In 2015, he was chosen out of nearly 7,000 other entries as the winner of NPR's Tiny Desk Contest, which featured him and a four-piece band performing "Lost in a Crowd" for the radio concert series. His 2016 debut LP, The Last Days of Oakland, won a Grammy for best contemporary blues album.

"I felt like it was a victory for the small guys, for the little artists," he says, noting that the record was released on Blackball Universe, an Oakland indie label and artist collective he co-founded with Malcolm Spellman, producer of the television series Empire.

His hometown, with all its attributes and negatives, plays a huge role in his work.

On songs such as the groovy "Working Poor," Negrito tackles gentrification, dissects failure and desperation on the brooding rocker "Rant Rushmore" and looks at police harassment and violence on the spoken "Interlude -- What Would You Do," which features people from his community talking about how they react when approached by police.

Negrito also reimagines Leadbelly's "In the Pines" on the streets of Oakland.

"I take that song as a tribute to the strongest people I knew growing up," he says, "mothers who have buried their children due to gun violence. It's something that happened in my family and there's something metaphorically and spiritually connected to that song. I wanted to do a version and write lyrics that were relevant to now."

He knew fiddling around with such a classic could backfire: "I was quite bold in changing the lyrics, changing the key, adding a bridge, but I think that's the beauty of being an artist. You have to take chances."

Work on a new album should begin over the winter, he says, and in the meantime he's looking toward bringing people together.

"That's the job of the artist," he says. "We look at a room of diversity and we just want to rock 'em and get them into the show. Politicians look at a room with diversity and want to divide them. We're not in that game."

Weekend on 10/19/2017

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