ARTICLE IN THE AUGUST 2007 BLUES AUDIENCE NEWSLETTER
By Bill Copeland
Blues Audience Newsletter
Melissa Barbosa and Chris Stovall Brown have had their band
together for a year now. Playing out under the catchy moniker of Sweet
Melissa With Chris Stovall Brown, their four-piece and sometime
five-piece tackle everything from old blues songs to 1960s R&B to
classic rock to modern pieces like "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley.
BAN caught up with their band at The Cantab Lounge in Cambridge
last month. Featuring Tom Vabulus on bass and Steve Peabody filling in
for regular drummer Chris Rivelli, the group teamed up with Cantab
booker Candido Delgado who played second guitar.
This unit went over big with the early to mid-20s crowd that
packed The Cantab and whom flooded the dance floor for the entire show.
Sweet Melissa With Chris Stovall Brown can straddle the
generations. She has been in the business only six years while. Brown
first made his mark in Beantown the early 1970s.
Barbosa was
out on the dance floor with her microphone while Brown nailed a solo on
blues classic "I Can Tell." They segued right into "Son Of A Preacher
Man" then "Proud Mary" and other hits from the last 50 years. Barbosa
was a natural party leader, driving the material home with a lot of
stage charisma. For a replacement drummer, Peabody fit right into the
grooves, found the right beats, and he even handled parts where the
music suddenly pauses.
"I love playing at The Cantab," Barbosa
exclaimed. "It's one of those rooms. It's been doing what it does for a
long time. People know what to expect when they go in there. They're
there to have a good time and dance. The chance is that great energy is
going to be really high. It's one of those little hole in the wall
clubs where you just hear great music."
Brown likes The Cantab
for its diverse audience, and because the room is usually packed. "The
Cantab has been an established venue for decades," he said. "I had the
opportunity to play there years ago, before Joe Cook even started
playing there with Luther Johnson."
Brown, as bandleader, has
to get the three-piece backing band to handle arrangements for songs
originally written and recorded for radio by larger bands, so the
audience can recognize the popular hook from the tune.
"We're trying to get the flavor of horn parts or keyboard parts as well
as the drive of the guitar parts," Brown explained. "It isn't like I'm
approaching it from a guitar point of view I'm approaching it from
'this is the arrangement and this is what needs to be in it and how
much of it can be handled with a guitar.'"
Barbosa began her
career singing for The SoulCats, a Cape Cod R&B and blues band. She
favors blues songs for their emotional impact. "It's a feeling thing,"
she said. "The genre just has songs where you can actually put it out
there and be really vulnerable. A lot of people can relate to the
message, broken hearts, breaking up, love songs."
The Cantab
gig last week was typical of a good crowd. "When it's a good crowd,
there's almost something magical that happens with the energy that
flows out between myself and the band and the crowd," Barbosa said.
"It's very reciprocal. You put it out there and it comes right back at
you. It's something bigger than you at that point."
Brown has
experience backing female vocalists. He's worked with Shirley Lewis,
Madeleine Hall, Toni Lynn Washington, Diane Blue, the list is endless.
"It takes a certain sensitivity to back up a vocalist," he said. "Not
just guitarists, but instrumentalists are more interested in getting
their own musical agenda across, sometimes to the detriment of the
vocalist in terms of playing too loud or playing too much."
Barbosa
respects her crowd. "I like to make sure that I'm present and
approachable and connected with them," she said. The pair and their
band play everywhere from The Grog in Newburyport to Onset Blues Cafe
to Kilroy's in Quincy, to Fat Boy Bill's in Milford.
Working
with Brown is another treat for Barbosa. "I don't have to say that he's
talented," she said. "Most people know that. He just is who he is, and
he has a good time. I don't ever have to worry about his energy level
or his attitude or his mood. He's a real pro. He's a pretty happy guy.
He just gets up there, and he does his thing and he does it very well.
That obviously rubs off on me too."
Sweet Melissa With Chris
Stovall Brown came together after Barbosa's SoulCats fizzled out. She
wanted to work with another band as rooted in blues and R&B as
SoulCats but with really good players. She had caught up with Brown at
his jam at Wally's in Boston and found him willing to give it a shot.
The well-respected blues guitarist soon found himself playing out with
the soul-influenced Barbosa.
Brown played a myriad of
instruments as a youth but settled on guitar and harp for their melodic
ranges. Growing up in Providence helped expose him to R&B at
Newport festivals. Mostly, he learned about music because his parents
had eclectic tastes. His father owned a coffeehouse in the early 1960s
where musicians would come and play.
As a teen, Stovall played
at weddings and high school dances. He came up to Boston in the early
1970s to play the clubs. In his lengthy career he has only made CD,
"Front Page Blues." He liked to make another this year.
"There's
no bevy of labels that are assaulting me on a daily basis," he quipped.
Brown was convinced to form the Sweet Melissa With Chris Stovall Brown
act after seeing her perform at benefits. "She was working with a band
at that point. But whenever I hear somebody that's good, I always say
"It'd be nice to do something with this person at some point. She had a
certain thing in her voice that appealed to me. I think we have a good
vocal blend. We have a lot of similar tastes in tunes that we like than
what people would expect from us. She has a versatility you sometimes
don't find with other singers. I don't consider her a blues singer or
an R&B singer so much as just a singer." 