Local musicians abandon popular genres in search of muddier waters
by Bill Forman
Watching Jack Trades frontman Mike Clark onstage, you might never imagine that he's been playing music for just a few years. A landscape surveyor by trade, he came down with his own case of the blues three years ago during a road trip to Seattle with a guitarist friend.
Watching Jack Trades frontman Mike Clark onstage, you might never imagine that he's been playing music for just a few years. A landscape surveyor by trade, he came down with his own case of the blues three years ago during a road trip to Seattle with a guitarist friend.
"He showed me a few things, and I was pretty much hooked after that," says Clark. "Along the way, I bought a harmonica from a little thrift store and started playing blues songs or trying to play blues songs and just kind of stuck with it."
A year later, he hooked up with drummer Todd Bruington, who, unlike Clark, had been playing since his parents bought him a junior drum kit when he was 8. Clark first saw Bruington playing with the Corporate Ninjas "they were like a metal-meets-reggae funk band" and the duo has been gigging for the last two years. They're anything but mellow, attacking the blues with an enthusiasm that's as contagious as it is convincing. Neighborhood complaints have forced them to go acoustic at a few gigs, but the louder electric shows are definitely the Jack Trades' strong suit.
"Some of the songs on our albums are straightforward old-school 12-bar blues," says Clark, "and then we have some that are real aggressive electric stuff. The White Stripes are one of my favorite bands, and so are the Black Keys. When I started listening to that stuff, I realized there's just a huge following for that kind of thing."
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