Chino Swingslide
And Nathan James…
Blues to Boleros
By T.E. Mattox

n January Nathan James said his friend, Chino Swingslide, was visiting from Barcelona. The intent was to get out to a few music venues around Southern California, have a little fun and play some music. Swingslide and James met a few years ago at the Barcelona Blues Festival and out of that meeting a musical friendship developed. In the extremely short period of time that Chino would be in town, the pair were planning a mini-tour through the Southland and were scheduled to play almost every evening with multiple and varied band configurations. Enlisting help from some of San Diego's premier musicians the band on any given night could feature anyone from Marty Dodson and Billy Watson to Carl Sonny Leyland and Ben Powell.

The venues were as diverse and their music selections. The guitarists played blues and gypsy jazz in several bars throughout San Diego, a few standards and some R&B on acoustic resonators in theater settings and even made a few coffee houses jump and swing with well-timed and blazing boleros. The duo even made it up to the NAMM convention for some impromptu sets and performed a couple of gigs in Los Angeles County. And they did it all in less than two weeks.

After witnessing two of their shows, a wild and raucous evening at the Fallbrook Brewery in North County and the other a more refined multiple resonator jam session at the New Village Arts Theater in Carlsbad, I finally had an opportunity to sit down with both for a brief conversation. Our talk began with Chino's road from Argentina through Barcelona and just how it led him to his current and amazing repertoire of blues. "When I was a child I started playing the Ramones, the Clash and things like that for a short time." He grins. "I went to a teacher in the neighborhood and he gave me some recordings to learn… Screaming Jay Hawkins and the Constipation Blues! Yeah, it was a great beginning because I was so curious and then I listened to Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. And then I started buying blues CD's because they were the cheapest ones. They were Country Blues recordings that no one in Argentina was buying. I was buying Bukka White, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Boy Fuller, Sonny and Brownie and I was playing in standard tuning. Then I started with the slide, but it was hard for me to start playing electric blues. It was new to me, you know? I was playing the finger-picking style."

Ben Powell, Chino Slingslide, Nathan James, Billy Watson and Daniel Blank
in Carlsbad

What motivated you to switch to electric blues? "Life!" He states. "You have to start working in clubs with amplifiers… festivals. Country blues is great but sometimes you need music to resonate."

What were your biggest influences on the electric side of blues? "I liked a lot," Chino says and proceeds to run down the list. "Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Freddie and Albert King, Albert Collins and all these people… T-Bone Walker."

In your live sets on this tour, you played some Big Bill Broonzy as well. "Big Bill Broonzy is quite new to me, you know? I listened to all these CD's I bought and started listening to Big Bill about two years ago and I discovered he's one of the best."

Let's talk a little about your album that celebrates the 100th Anniversary of Willie Dixon's birth, how did that come about? "He was always one of my favorites." Chino says. "Sometimes when I listen to John Lee Hooker or Lighnin' Hopkins, it's the same sound, same style… but with Willie Dixon it's different. It's not always the twelve bar blues, he has different melodies and last year I did the Dixon Tribute album. I tried to do the songs a bit different, not exactly like Willie did them. You know in Barcelona and Argentina sometimes the blues people try to do the songs exactly the same way they used to play them. I don't like that. They were listening to country blues and then they played them electric. When Little Walter plugged his mike into an amplifier, that was new. Why do I have to do the same as he did? I like to learn from them, but not to play it exactly the same."

Everyone turned out for Chino Swingslide, EVERYONE.

Nathan, tell me how this mini-tour came together? "Last year about this time I planned a trip to Spain and Chino was excited about helping. And I'm like, 'Wow, why would you want to help me?' but I really appreciated it." (laughing)

"A friend of mine," Chino says, "Said Nathan was coming and can you help? And I was in a very bad moment and I said, 'I don't know, but I will try.' I tried and some places told me no and I was very depressed. And then a guy from a bar called me and said, 'Hey, we want to book this guy.' And I started to fix more dates and we made it."

Nathan adds, "Even a couple of times before that I had played in Spain and he lent me half of his band. His bass player Rodrigo, is one of the best bass players as far as I'm concerned, anywhere."

On these California dates you've played with so many people and the band took on a variety of shapes, sizes and sounds. "We played with some other fellow resonator players that aren't really in the blues world," Nathan says. "But they know a lot of the gypsy jazz stuff. Nathan Rivera and Shine Delphi, and in their circuit they're really well known and are even endorsed by guitar companies. Then playing with Carl Sonny Leyland in a real swing band, and tonight we had another guitarist, Ben Powell and violinist, Daniel Blank. At the ongoing NAMM gathering in L.A. we played an impromptu jam with Doug MacLeod and Catfish Keith. At the NAMM show and the National booth, the people they endorse are really virtuoso's on resonator guitars and one of the guys, Steve James who knows a lot of Spanish musicians… when Chino started playing Steve and I were talking and I think he was kind of blown away by it."

What was really unique about this short tour, it featured such a wide variety of styles, both musically and in presentation. Was that intentional? "We sometimes forget," Chino tells me. "That music is a real expression of yourself. We are professional musicians and it's our job. But sometimes you forget about that and it can become boring to play it the same way all the time. It's our personality coming out from the instrument and vocals. I don't play like Nathan and Nathan cannot play like me and we all do our stuff. If we all do it authentically and play it from the heart, it's gonna' be good. It's not competition, its music and it has to come from your heart and you have to be yourself. That's why those people (the early bluesmen) were so great. Muddy Waters was not a good guitar player and neither was John Lee Hooker, but their music was great! And they have their style and you can recognize them and then you have Django (Reinhardt) he was from Mars. I don't know, or Wes Montgomery. These people are genius, Thelonious Monk… but they were them, they were not copying others, it was personal. And now you have people trying to copy Charlie Parker… f*#k you! You can copy, but he did the solo, do your own! It's very hard to create your personal sound."

Chino Swingslide busts out a Bolero. Photo: Yachiyo Mattox

Don't you think that's why the blues will always be around? It's passed down through the generations and players continue to add their personal touch and/or emotion to the genre… "Some people say it's all been done, it's all been created, but I think we can because we are all individuals, I have my way and he has his way. I'm not good at copying; I can't because I have to play it my way. A good example, I see Nathan play something and I try to copy a little thing and we are sharing little things but I cannot play everything like he does. We learn from other people."

What do you think you learned from your first tour through Southern California? "I think I will return home with more self-confidence. It's a challenge for me to sing for an American audience. I'm doing American music and it's not my language and it's not my culture."

Speaking as a music fan, you'd be hard-pressed to tell.

Related Articles:
Nathan James: Southern California Roots Run Delta Deep; Billy Watson: San Diego's Mr. Natural; 'Iceman' Albert Collins; The Blues Are Alive and Well in Southern California; Big Daddy Kinsey, Pinetop Perkins & Hubert Sumlin; Ode to Little Walter;