Smokey blows his horn at Blues in the Basement 5, February 1999. (Photo: The Substation)
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Kelvin "Smokey" Ng
The standard blues profile in Singapore (not unlike a lot of other places) is a Strat-owning, "blues equals guitar solo"-minded Hendrix/SRV protege. Fortunately, the gods crave diversity, and they wound up inventing Kelvin "Smokey" Ng, a twenty-seven-year-old harp ace who plays and sings some of the purest blues you can find in Singapore. With a style derived from Aleck "Rice" Miller, Paul Butterfield, Jimmy Reed, and Slim Harpo, Smokey is a tremendous talent whose playing seldom gets the accompaniment it deserves from his so-called blues peers. ("Kelvin plays too black," complains one local rock guitarist. This, in a nutshell, is Singapore's blues-personality complex: that most of the musicians trying to play blues can't delve any deeper than a "white" version of it.) But none of this has altered Smokey's approach to music; while he remains a blues underdog at most jam sessions, Smokey sticks to his guns, trying to conjure up a boogie or blues shuffle from all the pieces. That's what you get for playing "too black" in Singapore -- you're stuck paying your dues.
Smokey picked up harmonica at the age of sixteen. Blues harp role models don't grow on trees in Singapore, so he studied his records, caught on to Sonny Boy II and Little Walter, and ventured out on jamming missions. During Singpore's early 1990s pre-recession era, venues like the Duxton Chicago Bar, Down Under, Roadhouse, and Woodstock were ripe with rock 'n' rollers, hippie-wannabes, and blues freaks -- "artistic breeding ground" might be an extreme term, but it was definitely jam central, and so began Smokey's first teeth-cutting sessions. He sharpened up his Hohner in Australia, where he spent two years studying journalism in the classroom and blues in the biker bars.
After returning home in 1997, Smokey teamed up briefly with Stephen Low's Soul Searchers before joining the Blues in the Basement revue. In six mini-concerts staged over a year-and-a-half, Smokey's harp-heavy act, Skunk Jive, introduced Singaporeans to a wide variety of electric and acoustic blues, from Tampa Red to Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Keb' Mo' to Big Walter Horton. The Blues in the Basement series ended its run in 1999 with a February harp-slinger show (featuring Skunk Jive and French harp maestro J. J. Milteau) and then a June gig billed as a tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson. Smokey has also been a regular at blues jams at Roomful of Blues, Crazy Elephant, Bernie Goes To Town, Aubrey's, and O.D.'s Backstage Music Bar. Show business thugs have already started knocking (including Chinese rock music producers who've nabbed him as a sessionist), so stay tuned. But whatever happens to Smokey, he's sure to stay rooted in the blues and help carve out an identity for contemporary blues in Singapore. Trivia buffs beware -- if you say the secret password, Smokey might give you the recipe for making a black cat bone.
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