* En anglais uniquement
Veteran singer/harmonica player/guitarist
Tom Ball is best-known for his longtime partnership with
Kenny Sultan, who is also a guitarist. When
Ball and
Sultan are performing together as a blues-oriented acoustic duo -- often without bass or drums --
Ball's primary role is that of a singer who plays harmonica. In the blues world, people tend to think of
Ball as a vocalist instead of an instrumentalist. But in fact,
Ball is both a singer and an instrumentalist -- and when he isn't performing blues-oriented duets with
Sultan, he can be a fine acoustic guitar picker along the lines of
John Fahey,
Leo Kottke,
Robbie Basho, and
Stefan Grossman. The late
Fahey (born 1939, died 2001) wrote the book on what has been called picker music -- pickers are essentially folk instrumentalists who play acoustic guitar (often unaccompanied), and
Ball is among the many rootsy, earthy, down-home guitarists who has been greatly influenced by
Fahey's innovations. While picker music pretty much falls into the folk category, a picker can have a variety of influences; typically, pickers will listen to anyone from
Woody Guthrie,
Bill Monroe, and
the Carter Family to
Robert Johnson and
Blind Lemon Jefferson. Acoustic country blues, bluegrass, old-time country, and string bands have had a strong influence on the picker field, and
Ball has been affected by all of those things. He has also been affected by European classical music; admirers of
Ball's instrumental work have been impressed by his ability to play
Johann Sebastian Bach one minute and
Merle Travis the next. Regrettably,
Ball hasn't recorded very many unaccompanied solo projects, although the self-produced
Guitar Music (which was recorded for the Kicking Mule label in 1987) is a fine example of what he can do by himself. What do
Ball's duets with
Sultan and his unaccompanied instrumental work have in common? Both are examples of what has been loosely defined as roots music;
Ball brings a great deal of blues feeling to the table regardless of whether or not he is playing something with 12 bars.
Ball, who was born in 1950 and grew up in Los Angeles, started playing guitar at the age of 11 and harmonica at 14. The virtuoso moved to Santa Barbara, CA (a few hours north of L.A.), in 1978, and he formed a duo with
Sultan the following year.
Ball and
Sultan, whose duets have been greatly influenced by the legendary
Sonny Terry/
Brownie McGhee team, provided their first album as a duo, Who Drank My Beer?, for Kicking Mule in 1983. The
Ball/
Sultan duo went on to record several albums for the Chicago-based Flying Fish Records in the '80s and '90s. ~ Alex Henderson