Take a Musical Spin Down Route 66 With The Great Buffalo Blues

Just like the famed Route 66 upon which you'd find a number of early burger joints (including the very first McDonald's), there's a distinct Americana flavor in The Great Buffalo Blues' music.

"Route 66 crossed all kinds of music scenes. So maybe a fusion-style band like ours is just the right thing to celebrate that," says Kamau Rucker, guitarist and co-vocalist for the burgeoning Beijing band. As one of the acts performing at this weekend's Burger Festival, they're eager to explore the event's Route 66 theme. "That’s the beautiful thing about those long interstates, the crazy routes people took. You had bluegrass and you had blues, you had jazz and you had folk."

Great Buffalo Blues has built a strong reputation in Beijing's music scene, since forming two years ago, for dabbling in all those genres and more, before distilling them into a dynamic sound all of their own. The lineup features Rucker, an American, Dooder of Burundi on bass, and drummer Elliot Zon from Hong Kong.

Dooder and Rucker founded the band in 2017 while hanging out at Guanghua Lu bistro and low-key music venue Caravan. Their conversation about their respective previous bands turned into them jumping on stage and taking a blues deep dive, before spiraling into a jam, and then into impromptu songwriting. From there the pair continued practicing, writing, and after recruiting Zon, gigging at a varied array of venues around Beijing, from Caravan and Temple to Jianghu and School Bar (the latter awarding them Best Foreign Band of the Year in 2018).

Although Rucker and Dooder's musical chemistry was apparent from the get-go, their drastically different backgrounds made the match even more incredible. Back in Burundi, Dooder struggled to not only become a musician, but even find a scene to delve into. He says the traditional values and economic blight of that landlocked East African country "pressure everyone to be a doctor or a lawyer. So the music scene is tiny, and I had to hide my involvement from my parents and play in bands afterschool." However, that tense environment had its advantages in Dooder's view, mainly: "People who do get into it are really passionate. Because if you’re soft, everyone will slap you and say, 'What are you doing with your time? You’ll end up like a homeless guy on the side of the road!'”

Rucker had the opposite problem, wading into New York's notoriously saturated music scene as a member of punk, neo-folk, and rock groups. Although he loved the eclectic opportunities that the Big Apple offered, it was by no means easy to sink his teeth in for a bite. "The waitlists are months long there, and not even at big clubs – we're talking small Brooklyn cafés," Rucker says.

Playing in Beijing with Dooder and Zon makes for a refreshing alternative, in Rucker's view. That's because the Chinese capital's relatively scene is small enough to break into without too much hassle, while also being big enough to offer nightly gigs. That well-roundedness also allows Great Buffalo Blues to pursue their passion for fusion, where other locales might have more narrow-minded audiences.

Aside from a growing repertoire of rugged yet grooving originals – "We have two setlists that we play regularly, and a mysterious third set of more offbeat stuff that we don't often get to," says Rucker with a chuckle; check out their soulful, reggae-tinged "7th Floor" here – Great Buffalo Blues also likes to toss in the occasional cover. On that front, they're partial to well-aged folk standards like "The Wayfaring Stranger" (interpreted by a who's who of singer-songwriters like Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, and even Neko Case). They also like to close their sets with a more obscure gem: "Truce" by a cult Ohio band 21 Pilots.

Dooder is quick to point out, however, that "If we do a cover, you won't recognize it as someone else's at first."

Rucker concurs. "We don't play 'Truce' the way 21 Pilots do, with keys and softness and anything digital," he says of Great Buffalo Blues' harder, bluesier rendition of that song, adding: "For us, a cover isn’t a cover. It’s an adaptation."

Laudable as that artistic integrity is, the band doesn't see penning music for an advertisement as selling out. Or at least Rucker jokingly told us, as the Burger Fest loomed, that updating an old fast food TV spot might be fun, saying: "If we were to write for any burger restaurant's ad, I'd be inspired by this old Burger King commercial from the '90s [skip to the 3min mark] that had a hair metal band called Cok Rock. BK was promoting their new chicken fries and these headbangers kept screaming about 'crossing the road!'"

Rucker then grins with faux nostalgia and says: "I'd redo that ad in a minute, with all the Burger King mascots. That'd be awesome."

Catch Great Buffalo Blues alongside several other Beijing bands at this year's Burger Fest.

More stories by this author here.
Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
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Photos courtesy of Great Buffalo Blues, the Beijinger