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 Luther Kent, once the lead singer with Blood, Sweat & Tears, has been performing selected concert Dates -- like the Cotton Club in Japan -- with the DUKES. On the Friday of the second weekend of New Orleans' Jazz and Heritage Festival, he was featured in the Times Picayune. Here's the story..... As international tours, a television role and bar ownership have come and gone, the groove keeps bringing Luther Kent back to the stage.
By Kate Moran Friday, May 4, 2007 When Luther Kent was on a world tour with the band Blood, Sweat & Tears three decades ago, living the dream of singing to titanic crowds, he realized during a quiet moment in front of the mirror that the dream was dross.
Fame has never been a narcotic for Kent, a rhythm and blues singer with a prodigious voice who, friends say, didn't want a life of rehashing the same hit songs to anonymous audiences in stadiums and on college campuses.
Although Kent has flirted with bigger things -- the two-year tour as lead singer for Blood, Sweat & Tears and a singing role on the television musical "Cop Rocks" -- he says he finds his greatest satisfaction playing small clubs where the music takes over the room.
"I am always after the elusive groove," he said recently, as his band set up for a show at the Uptown bar Monkey Hill. "When the band clicks and 13 musicians are in lock at one time -- you can't go to the corner store and buy that."
Monkey Hill is the intimate sort of venue Kent craves, so much so that his band -- an ensemble of six horns, a guitar, bass, keyboard, drums and burly front man -- looked as if it might not leave much room for an audience.
LONG COLLABORATION
Kent is 58, and most of his bandmates are a little graying. Some of them have been playing together since 1978, when Kent and guitarist Charlie Brent, who died last year, formed the band Trick Bag and started playing clubs in the French Quarter.
Bourbon Street in those days had not yet morphed into a tawdry playpen for tourists, and musicians passing through the city on tour would often stop at bars like the Blue Saloon to hear Trick Bag's after-hours set.
Kent and the others would take the stage about 2 a.m., when most of the crowd was foggy after an evening of drinking and heady music, and they would groove until the sun came up. They always brought sunglasses for the moment the sun singed their eyes as they emerged from the dark club.
Boz Scaggs, Greg Allman, B.B. King and the Righteous Brothers all sat in with Kent as he sang late into the night. Etta James once sat on his lap and crooned for more than two hours, said Johnny Vodanovich, the owner of Monkey Hill and a friend who has known Kent for decades.
"If you were with a date, he did all the work for you," Vodanovich said of those times. "He sings with such feeling and such emotion. You can tell he cares."
FOCUSING ON THE MUSIC
Kent opened his own bar, Luther Kent's House of the Rising Sun at Dauphine and Conti streets, during those raging days, but he soon lost his taste for entrepreneurship.
"I always wanted to own a nightclub -- till I owned a nightclub," Kent said. "You get caught up in all the things that do not pertain to playing music."
The transformation of Bourbon Street into a strip of T-shirt shops and canned music is a source of chagrin for Kent and his band. (Don't even mention their former haunt, the Old Absinthe Bar, now a daiquiri shop.) But fans of Trick Bag say the band has not lost its verve and grit even as some parts of the city's musical history were sanitized.
"He's probably got the earthiest voice I ever heard," said Ron Thompson, a fan who has followed the band since the Bourbon Street days. "He has a complete feel for the blues. And he's a survivor."
Kent has always been a big guy, and he underwent quadruple bypass surgery about a decade ago when years of hearty eating and drinking caught up with him. Friends say he has shed considerable weight since he was diagnosed with diabetes about a year ago.
But he still has a voice that can tame a six-piece horn section.
Kent, a New Orleans native who started recording music before he emerged from puberty, said he grew up admiring the "natural, lush sound" of singers such as Bobby "Blue" Bland and Ray Charles.
As Trick Bag's brass section wailed during the Monkey Hill show, Kent's voice -- corrugated, earth-toned and emotive -- cut through the wall of sound like a buzz saw.
Beate Sandor, a jazz aficionado in town from Vienna, Austria, was ecstatic.
"He is well-known in Europe," Sandor said, as she shanghaied a partner at random and hit the dance floor. "I wanted to see him live -- unplugged -- once in my life."
Thirty years after his world tour with Blood, Sweat & Tears, Kent continues to travel the world singing his style of rhythm and blues, inflected with New Orleans influences. He recently headlined the Cotton Club in Tokyo, and Trick Bag was among the local bands invited this year to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
"He doesn't really relish the big time, but people in the music business around the world know Luther," Vodanovich said. "They appreciate his talent."
But Kent, who lives with his wife, Joan Rowell, in Baton Rouge, said his heart is in Louisiana.
"We had the biggest sound in the world in the 1960s," Kent said of New Orleans. "Then the British invasion happened. It took a natural disaster to make the world aware of New Orleans music again."
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Two new DUKES CDs are now available online in the store, 
Timeless, The Classic Collection is a four CD set that contains 4 hours of music and 58 tunes from 16 albums recorded over the past 32 years, 1974 to 2006. It includes a FREE 20-page color 