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Ashland students hit Strato-sphere in festival warmup Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell Bluesman Otis Taylor serenades Ashland Middle School eighth-grader Morgan Johnston during a blues program in the school's gym. By BILL VARBLE There is nothing like the sound of a Fender Stratocaster in the morning. It is enough, finally, to flood the Ashland Middle School gym with kids boogying to Otis Taylor's hard-driving blues. The bursting of the dam comes when Josh Hogeland, 12, runs onto the floor and launches into a high-energy break-dancing routine that merges dead-on with the deep groove of Taylor's band and brings down the house, the rap generation meeting roots music. Taylor, a Boulder, Colo.-based bluesman, is in town for the second annual Rogue Valley Blues Festival this weekend in Ashland. He's slated to do shows later Friday at a high school and a youth correctional facility. He performs tonight at the festival at the Old Ashland Armory and is scheduled to take part in the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration Monday at Southern Oregon University. Just Thursday, his band's latest album, "White African," bagged four nominations for the W.C. Handy Awards, the blues industry's equivalent of the Grammys. How do you turn on a roomful of 11- to 14-year-olds growing up on Britney Spears to music older than their grandparents' dreams? "I make it fun," Taylor says before the show. "It's self-explanatory." Taylor starts by telling kids that blues came from African slaves brought to America to work the fields, but he hints at something universal. "Everybody gets the blues," he says, bending blues licks on an acoustic Epiphone guitar. This is a man who played with Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix, a man whose great-grandfather was lynched by a white mob and torn to pieces, information he doesn't share with the kids. A call-and-response-style ditty about a grizzly bear, almost a field shout, gets kids singing along. Taylor tells the story of the music coming north in the 1920s and '30s with the great migration of blacks from the South to the cities and factories. Joined by bassist Kenny Pasarelli, who is also his producer, and lead guitar player Eddie Turner, he plays a mid-tempo number featuring Turner on slide guitar. By the time the band gets to "Hungry People," from "White African," this middle-aged guy in jeans and jacket and a baseball cap owns the crowd. "We're older than your teachers," he says. By the time of the rousing "Hambone," a Bo Diddley-style, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm rave-up, the teachers are boogying with the kids. After the band brings it all home, Molly Murphy, 11, a student in Heidi Heidig's sixth-grade class, pronounces the event inspiring. "It was amazing, really beautiful," she says. "We could really feel we were part of the music," 12-year-old Andrew McAllister says. "I liked the guy that played with the weird metal thing," Daniel Cropper, 11, says of Turner's slide playing. "It makes you feel good inside," Molly says. Surrounded by excited kids, Josh Hogeland says he started dancing at 5, taught by an older friend. He usually listens and dances to rap. "This," he says, "is almost better." Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.