Guitar stars
Delta blues, fancy finger work highlight Focus show
Danielle Miraglia plays slide guitar and croons about matters of the heart, but doesn't consider herself a blues artist.
"I don't think it's possible in modern times to play the true blues," she says. "You can get into the vibe and the rhythm of it, but real blues are no longer in existence, because the place where they came from isn't reality anymore."
"You just dig deeper and deeper to the roots of everything," she explains.
Miraglia didn't drop out of college to play the Boston coffee shop circuit in search of a record deal. She never went couch surfing across America with nothing but her guitar and a faded pair of Levi's. Instead, Miraglia earned a creative writing degree from Emerson University and took a job at a local law firm. The regular paycheck was nice, but life as an office drone was a drag.
"I don't wake up until noon unless it's absolutely necessary," Miraglia says. "I've always been that way, ever since I was a little kid. It's never felt right to me to get up and go to a 9 to 5 job. I don't like to have to answer to somebody."
After the economy tanked following 9/11, she found herself unemployed. This opened the door for more open mics and time to concentrate on lyrics.
"I thought if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it," Miraglia says. "It sounds really cheesy, but I think I found the people I was supposed to be around. I had a couple of close friends, but it wasn't really a scene. I never stopped [playing music] from there."
It didn't take long for her new life as a musician to take off. "Just Wrong Enough," her 2002 full-length debut, showcased her smoky vocals and Delta blues grooves. With the Boston press behind her, Miraglia broke out of Massachusetts for dates up and down the East Coast. Her fiance Tom Bianchi believes a strong work ethic deserves much of the credit for a growing audience.
"She bangs away at the guitar," he says. "A lot of folkies like to strum, but she's a real guitar player. She doesn't write a song in an hour. She plays riffs over and over until they're right."
It has been four years since her last CD, but Miraglia isn't in much of a hurry.
"It costs a lot of money to make an album. But now I finally have a nice home studio, so I'm able to it on my own time."
Miraglia's talent has carried her this far, but her long blonde hair and fashion model bone structure are hard to ignore. She laughs off questions about her looks.
"It's such a weird thing to talk about because no matter how I answer that question, it's going make to me sound vain," she laughs. "If you just rest on being cute or whatever, it's fake and it's not going to last. I find it very dangerous for that to be part of who you are."
Since making music her career, Miraglia has earned a loyal following in the Northeast, but her songs haven't received national exposure.
"I've been able to maintain this sort of humble career over the last six or seven years," she says. "I feel I've had this sort of slow incline. Some people peak really early, and then they're done. I'd just be happy to tour to all these places and have a full room."
Splitting the bill with Miraglia in Rockville next Wednesday will be Jacob Johnson. At 23, the acoustic guitar phenom has taken a different path. He started fiddling with chords when he was 12. By 16, he was leaving his Greenville, S.C., home to play in bars around the Southeast with the blues-rock outfit Alternative Solution. Although Johnson enrolled at North Greenville University, he didn't stick around for long.
"God didn't give me the gift of music so I could sit in a classroom," he says. "When you go to a Christian school where your dad's a dean, that can be misunderstood. But it just wasn't working out. I thought I could go to school when I'm 60, but I might not be able to write a song in three years."
Johnson doesn't just strum and sing about love; he's all over the place. Influenced by technical masters like Pat Metheny and fellow southerner Kaki King, he developed an approach that requires tight coordination of both hands as he slaps and taps the neck of his instrument.
"It just seems so expressive and organic," he says of the virtuoso style. "If you were alone on a desert island with an acoustic guitar, you could do this stuff."
A couple of years ago, Johnson bought a mid-level Alvarez at a pawnshop. He'd played better guitars, but the purchase left him plenty of money to soup it up with microphones and a bridge plate pick up. The accessories help shape a more natural tone and allow Johnson to amplify every inch of his guitar.
"When you're gigging and you're traveling a lot, it just doesn't make sense to carry a $3,000 dollar guitar," he explains. "It's not something that's irreplaceable. I would miss it, but I could find another instrument."
Gray Lee, one of Johnson's close friends and biggest fans, is also a Greenville-based singer/songwriter. The two met 10 years ago at a magic club.
"There were these little kids doing card tricks," Gray remembers. "I did one I thought was pretty good for Jacob, and he said, ‘Yeah, I used to do that one.' We still laugh at how we used to be magicians together."
He believes Johnson is on the right path because of the growing virtuoso movement.
"There's really no one who plays like him," says Gray, 29. "He's completely original. He builds one thing on top of another. A lot of people do fancy finger work and it doesn't mean anything. When Jacob plays, people just eat it up."
The industry is starting to eat it up, too. Johnson has already shared the stage with pedal steel master Robert Randolph and opened for Dave Matthews collaborator Tim Reynolds twice. Johnson also sings. Well, sort of. Partly in tribute to the Beat Generation, Johnson speaks many of his lyrics. He has even written a song about hanging out with Jack Kerouac in New York City.
"When I started doing solo work and playing by myself, I had really never sung before," he explains. "It was kind of a way to perform the stuff I was writing, but not really have to sing."
The spoken word gives Johnson license to play to the crowd. At times, his shows border on stand-up comedy. One of his songs, "Treat Her Right," is a seductive ode to his guitar, not a woman.
"Poets can by very serious, and yet they're not afraid to be funny," he says. "They'll use humor to make their point. That's kind of my personality. If I'm going to be true to myself, I have to have something in there to make it Jacob."
Danielle Miraglia and Jacob Johnson will perform at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24, at Vic's Music Corner at Branded '72, 387 East Gude Drive, Rockville. The show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 at the door, $12 for Focus members or in advance. Call 301-275-7459 or visit
www.focusmusic.org.
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