“Am I as loud as I can get?” asked Melody Angel. “Testing, one, two. Testing.”
On a recent afternoon in a West Loop studio, Angel was rehearsing for the first time with a new bass and drummer combo. Volume was an important consideration because the singer, songwriter and guitar ace spent much of the past two years muted while hunkered down due to COVID-19.
Hailed three years ago, pre-pandemic, as “the future of the blues” in an article by Chicago music writer David Whiteis, Angel is preparing for a re-emergence onto music stages. She’ll start with Reggies Rock Club on Thursday and double billing at the Chicago Blues Festival Saturday and Sunday. A slate of high-profile performances follows.
The concerts will give a fresh hearing to some of the most personally and socially powerful songs Angel has ever written, from her 2020 album She Black, which digs hard into the despair she felt following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that year. Chicago has a tradition of potent blues women, but Angel modernizes the notion, bringing new ideas and a millennial vitality to a genre that can seem ossified.
“This Blues Fest is like the kickoff of my doing shows on a regular basis,” said the 31-year-old Bronzeville resident, who was reluctant to perform during the pandemic due to the risks of the virus.
“You’re talking about somebody who’s never said no to a gig,” she said with a laugh. “If somebody called me for something, I would drop everything to go perform. And so it was really foreign to me to have to weigh these big ramifications.”
What she learned is that she wanted the money and the feeling of community she gets out of live performance less than she wanted to risk bringing the virus back to her mother, and manager, Stephanie Crystal, or to her young niece and nephew.
“It was gut-check time,” she said. “And I realized a lot about myself over this time – that I could sacrifice very much for my family and the people around me, if it mattered.”
She performed at some outdoor shows last summer and one indoor gig that she recalls, she said, at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. But by the time the indoor concert season came back around, so did a new COVID variant and she pulled back.
She was missed, said Tom Marker, the WXRT and WDCB blues deejay who’ll be on stage to help kick off Blues Fest on Thursday.
“I think she’s magnificent,” Marker said. “She’s got a really strong voice, and I mean that in a couple of ways: the way her singing voice sounds and the things that she talks about. She’s an outstanding guitar player. She doesn’t always do this, but she can play, like, Jimi Hendrix style. She’s a very, very welcome and necessary part of the Chicago blues scene.”
About that voice: Angel used some of her personal pandemic down time to write and record She Black, which incorporated not only her response to the Floyd and Taylor killings but to the protests that followed.
“Can’t go here, can’t go there / There’s no justice, there’s no fair,” says the chorus to the title track.
“I don’t know if people really understand the grief that Black people as a whole were going through in 2020,” Angel said. “It was a very dark time. And we grieve like it’s our family every time we see somebody on the news get gunned down. On top of that, you’re in a pandemic, and you’ve got people dying in astronomical numbers within your community. We were also out marching for justice. And so I was in a lot of pain in 2020.
“That whole album was my way of getting everything off my chest. She Black was dedicated to Breonna…
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