The Jazz Organ Scene

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Michael Bloomfield By the age of 14, Michael (* 1943 in Chicago, IL) was a guest in the blues clubs of Chicago's South Side. Here he regularly got into jam sessions with his idols like Muddy Waters, Otis Spann and Howlin' Wolf. He also met like-minded white people like Nick Gravenites and Charlie Musselwhite, with whom he would later play again and again.   In the mid-1960s he played with The Butterfield Blues Band, he was also involved in their first album of the same name. He worked for Bob Dylan and his album Highway 61 Revisited and performed with him at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where folk audiences fretted at the electrically amplified rock band. In 1967 Bloomfield was a co-founder of the group The Electric Flag, which, however, broke up again a year later. With Al Kooper, Michael recorded one side of the 1968 record Super Session, on the other side Stephen Stills was heard alongside Al Kooper. A year later, Michael and Al's The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper peaked at number 18. Both albums were more commercially successful than the Butterfield Blues Band and Electric Flag albums.   In the late 1960s he retired to San Francisco, where he occasionally performed with his old buddies as Bloomfield and Friends and recorded a few records. During this time he made his living mostly from producing soundtracks for porn films, but he also provided the soundtrack for Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool in 1969 and was involved in the music for the film Steelyard Blues with Paul Butterfield and Nick Gravenites in 1973. In the mid-1970s he shifted to more traditional acoustic blues. In the late 1970s he increasingly struggled with health problems and his drug addiction. He died in San Francisco in 1981.   Mike was named #42 in Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He was ranked 22nd in a 2003 list.   from Wikipedia

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