Hans Theessink

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Interview: The Drum Media, Australia (2 November 2004)	02/25/05
BLUES WITH A TOUCH OF THE WORLD The one and only Bo Diddley described him as "one helluva guitar player", though he probably didn't try to pronounce his name - Hans Theessink, pronounced Tay-sink - perhaps the finest exponent of authentic American roots and blues music to come out of continental Europe. HANS THEESSINK chats to MICHAEL SMITH The thing about Theessink is that, pretty much from the beginning of his love affair with the blues when, as a youngster, he heard the songs of Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly on the radio, he's been a writer in the blues, not just a copyist. "I'm blues-based but I like to give voice to some of the concerns that we have, and to present the European point of view or just a human point of view. So I didn't want to keep playing blues the same way it was done before and do like the 548th version of some Robert Johnson song, which I don't think makes much sense - even though I love that music, I love listening to it and I love playing it too. But if you want to work creatively with this stuff, you need to put your own personality in there. Blues, as I see it, is a very personal form, and old blues, it's always the individual talking about his point of view. There's never much of the surrounding world. It's always "me", the I. I still really like the musical and expressive possibillities within the blues and really love that style of playing, the emotion in that kind of music, so if you want to work creatively with it, then it's good to combine your own experiences with the musical possibillities that the blues has to offer". Which explains why you find songs that touch on broader socio-political issues on his records, songs like "What Will The Children Play", on his most recent album "Bridges" (Blue Groove) "I wrote that song in response to the wars in former Yugoslavia. My wife's family is from Serbia, and I played some gigs there about a week before Hell broke loose, and I saw these pictures on TV of children, eyes wide open, not really understanding what was going on. So I wrote the song, wondering what would become of these kids coming up under these hostile circumstances. I'd played at this jazz festival in Pristina in Kosovo and there was this mixed Serbian-Albanian band, and the drummer of that band had killed himself two days before because he just couldn't take the situation anymore, so it had been a pretty moving experience. On the way from this gig, I saw this eagle up in the sky, hunting, and there is an old Native American saying, "the eagle will outlive mankind", so I wove that into the song". It's also why you'll find other songs on "Bridges" that would seem unlikely choices if Theessink was looking at his work from a strictly purist blues point of view, songs like "Mbube" and "Zambezi", which utilise a vocal trio from Zimbabwe. "My music is blues based but I like to make excursions in different directions and on "Bridges", I worked extensively with my backing singers, who come from Zimbabwe, so we get that African twist. It's quite funny in a way, because for the African guys, blues is a new experience. We played a couple of festivals in North America this summer, and they were really amazed to learn of the African background of the blues. They didn't know much about that. I live in Austria, and the singers moved to Austria to study music, and I met them at a charity concert about six years ago and really liked their voices, so I involved them on an earlier album, singing on a couple of songs, and we've worked together a lot ever since. On "Bridges", I wrote some songs especially with their voices in mind, so it's quite a tight collaboration". For all his love of stretching the possibillities inherent in the Blues, and of bringing to the tradition a European world citizen's sensibillity that allows it another dimension of relevance within the contemporary scene in which Theessink is working, he is still in awe of the pioneers, and has done his little bit to chronicle their work, most recently in an album he produced in collaboration with America's Arlo Guthrie, "Banjoman, a tribute to Derroll Adams". "Derroll was a big influence. He come to Europe in the late 50s, played around London with Ramblin' Jack Elliott, but I only found out later that he'd influenced lots of other people too, so we got many of them involved in the "Banjoman" tribute record, which we actually started in order to support Derroll financially because he was quite ill during the later years of his life, but unfortunately he never got to hear the record."