Round Table Supersonic Blues Machine

ZZ Top Honcho Billy F Gibbons & Friends Look At The Roots Of Guitar Music And How The Blues Ended Up Shaping Everything

- Amit Sharma

Upstairs in one of London’s most prestigious rehearsal spaces, a discussion is taking place – dissecting one of the oldest forms of popular music and its place in the world today. Leading the conversation is ZZ Top founder Billy F Gibbons, joined by his Supersonic Blues Machine comrades Fabrizio Grossi and Kenny Aronoff, alongside the band’s special guests Serge Simic and the UK’s Kris Barras. Together, the five musicians explore how and why this near ancient artform, even after all these years, still has the ability to make just about any human being feel things that other genres simply can’t come close to. Blues power, it seems, is something that will stay in our DNA…

What do you feel when you hear the words ‘blues power’?

Billy F Gibbons: “Well, I think those two words go together for sure. There’s something about this thing called blues that continues to resonate. There’s that old saying that every 10 years or so, things come back and get rediscovered, but I feel as if the blues has more to it. I think that the genre has an international and global appeal. It appears very simple on first glance, but when you start digging in deeper you discover there are some real complexities to this art form. It’s pretty cool when you think about it… this mysterious thing that is honestly powerful. When you go back and listen to what Freddie King was doing purely instrumentally, it’s incredible. It was the same transition when Muddy Waters left his acoustic and figured out how to plug things in and get the whole electric thing going. It was a big, big change!”