Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose stinging style brought him Grammys and made him one of the world's leading blues guitarists, was killed yesterday when his helicopter crashed into a man-made hillside near this southern Wisconsin town, authorities said. Also killed in the crash were the copter's pilot and three of British rock star Eric Clapton's close friends - Clapton's agent Bobby Brooks, bodyguard Nigel Browne and aide Colin Smythe. The pilot has been identified as Jeff Brown of East Chicago, Ind. Clapton, Vaughan and guitarists Robert Cray and Buddy Guy had appeared together at an all-star rock-and-blues concert attended by 30,000 people at the outdoor Alpine Valley Music Center and had left after the show for Chicago in four chartered Bell 206 helicopters.

On his studio albums, blues guitarist-singer Stevie Ray Vaughan has made skillful but rather chilly, self-conscious music. His new in-concert double album Live Alive (Epic ), however, is another matter. These recordings, culled from four performances from Vaughan's most recent tour, display him and his band, Double Trouble, in a loose but adventurous mood, tearing through songs as various as Hank Ballard's "Look at Little Sister" and Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" with blithe abandon.

Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Texas blues guitarist who died in a helicopter crash yesterday, was a slow-talkin' Southerner who lived and breathed the blues both in his music, with its trademark flurries of searing, hard-edged guitar lines, and in his life as an itinerant musician, with its seemingly inevitable bouts with alcohol and drugs. Vaughan, 35, who had only recently met up with Eric Clapton on the English guitar legend's current U.S. tour, emerged from the fertile Austin, Texas, club scene in the mid-'70s.

I've been eagerly awaiting a couple of first-degree blues burners to devastate the landscape. One was Philly fave Tommy Conwell's second major label album. It's a set I'd hoped would capture more of the raw, blues rock excitement witnessed in Conwell's mesmerizing, walking-on-the-tables live performances. The other was a once-in a-lifetime (literally) album pairing of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his brother Jimmie. Years in the talking, but only weeks in the making, this collaboration was intended as a radical career move away from the brothers' own groups (Stevie's Double Trouble, Jimmie's Fabulous Thunderbirds)

Though his albums have built him a reputation as one of the most exciting young guitarists to emerge from the Chicago blues scene in some time, Melvin Taylor is still not as well-known in his homeland as he should be. Until the current U.S. tour that is bringing him to Philadelphia this weekend, the singer-guitarist had performed only in Europe and on his home turf on the Windy City's West Side. On his latest CD, Bang That Bell (Evidence), Taylor again offers a thrilling combination of incendiary technique and soul-deep feeling, stretching the boundaries of the blues to take in elements of jazz, funk and rock.

They were guitar gods of the highest order, and Duane Allman and Stevie Ray Vaughan each revitalized American music in his own way before dying far too young. Two new releases - the seven-CD Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective and the two-CD, 30th-anniversary reissue of Vaughan's Texas Flood - remind us of their enduring brilliance and power. Duane Allman is best-known as the founder of the Allman Brothers Band, the group that pretty much invented and then transcended Southern rock with its adventurous amalgam of rock, blues, country, jazz, and soul.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's blues time in Philadelphia. Wednesday night at the Tower Theater, Stevie Ray Vaughan, a guitar strangler from Texas, will lead his band, Double Trouble, through a set that will conjure up work from guitarists as far afield as Freddie King and Jimi Hendrix. Vaughan, whose older brother Jimmie holds down lead guitar duties for the Fabulous Thunderbirds, is today's hotshot of choice for blues fans who put more credence in guitar solos than in singing. Chicago blues will be featured tomorrow night at the Chestnut Cabaret when Junior Wells and Buddy Guy show how it's done on the South Side of the Windy City.

It's a sad commentary that Stevie Wonder needs MTV more than MTV needs Stevie Wonder. This wondrous superstar has been written off by soul radio for cranking out too many middle-of-the-road ballads like "I Just Called to Say I Love You," while MOR radio, ironically, has rejected his most recent album, "Characters," for being too hard-rocking. And by and large, Wonder's always been too black and too funky for the narrow minds who program and tune in album-rock radio. So what's a Wonder to do?

Fighting a case of the flu, legendary rock guitarist Jeff Beck did not return to the stage for a highly anticipated jam session with fellow axman Stevie Ray Vaughan at the end of the pair's double-billed Spectrum show Tuesday night. Despite a pre-performance announcement of the jam by WMMR-FM (93.3) disc jockey Michael Tearson, Beck - who opened the concert with an hour-long instrumental set - failed to reappear after Vaughan's spotlighted 70 minutes. Epic Records spokesman Vivian Piazza confirmed reports that Beck had been suffering from the flu, and contradicted previous publicity that the jam was intended to be fixture of the Beck-Vaughan tour.

Robert Plant is one of the great players of air guitar. Of course, he's had plenty of practice - he spent the '70s singing with Led Zeppelin, the '80s trying to establish a rock identity distinct from the heaviest of metal groups. But these days, with every Tom, Dick, and Whitesnake capitalizing on the Zeppelin sound, Plant has decided to protect his turf. The show he brought to the Spectrum last night, much like his recent Now and Then LP, was as much about celebrating the singer's past as presenting a new sound.

They were guitar gods of the highest order, and Duane Allman and Stevie Ray Vaughan each revitalized American music in his own way before dying far too young. Two new releases - the seven-CD Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective and the two-CD, 30th-anniversary reissue of Vaughan's Texas Flood - remind us of their enduring brilliance and power. Duane Allman is best-known as the founder of the Allman Brothers Band, the group that pretty much invented and then transcended Southern rock with its adventurous amalgam of rock, blues, country, jazz, and soul.

Music shoppers have good reasons to visit the "lost and found" department this week to dig out newly uncovered (or revamped) relics from Bruce Springsteen, Quincy Jones, Norah Jones, Jerry Garcia, Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan. A BRUCE BONANZA: In his perfectionist youth, Bruce Springsteen recorded far more material than he put out. Fans became frustrated by his delays as other musicians earned hits from his castaways. And sometimes a bootleg of a "lost" Springsteen album slipped out. Kinda crazy.

Doyle Bramhall 2d had a mission from God. "He called me out of the blue," says the former Arc Angel, "and told me I was one of his favorite contemporary artists of the '90s. And he wanted to get together 'cause he wanted to cover two of my songs. " Bramhall's father - same name, no numeral - drummed for Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Doyle Bramhall 2d taught Eric Clapton how to play the guitar. "He wanted to know if he had learned the songs right," recounts the 32-year-old Austin native.

Here's the thing about the blues, Sue Foley was saying. People think the music is simple to play, but it's not, and it has nothing to do with technical skill. "You can be a real accomplished musician and not be able to play the blues," Foley said last week from her home in her native Ottawa. "Like Clifford Antone said, 'This is stuff you can't teach people.' " But if you can play the blues, "you can go anywhere" musically. Foley should know. She can definitely play the blues, and in a field where performers can be hopelessly derivative, the 32-year-old has already transcended her influences to develop an absolutely riveting voice of her own. When she hit the music mecca of Austin, Texas, in 1992 to record for the Antone's label - she moved back to Canada a few years ago, just before the birth of her son - Foley had a reputation built mostly on her fiery fretwork.

Though his albums have built him a reputation as one of the most exciting young guitarists to emerge from the Chicago blues scene in some time, Melvin Taylor is still not as well-known in his homeland as he should be. Until the current U.S. tour that is bringing him to Philadelphia this weekend, the singer-guitarist had performed only in Europe and on his home turf on the Windy City's West Side. On his latest CD, Bang That Bell (Evidence), Taylor again offers a thrilling combination of incendiary technique and soul-deep feeling, stretching the boundaries of the blues to take in elements of jazz, funk and rock.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd sings with the passion of a "poor boy" who's really lived the blues, and plays guitar with the piercing power and punch associated with the most seasoned six-string masters. His album "Ledbetter Heights" (Giant/Revolution) has a solid lock on the Number 1 slot of the Billboard blues chart, the guy's getting more radio play than all the kings of the blues scene, and Shepherd's flock is selling out shows wherever they go - tomorrow facing a packed house at TLA. Not too shabby for a guy who's barely old enough to vote and who can't even drink in any of the bars where his band plays.

Forget what that sniffling grouse Sine-Aid O'Connor said about the Grammys being just another gross celebration of commerce. When the envelopes were opened and the winners tallied at last night's 33rd annual record industry do from New York, justice was served on most musical fronts - from the eccentric pop composer Angelo Badalamenti ("Twin Peaks" theme) to hotshot bluegrass comer Allison Krauss to the brilliant New Age jazz trumpeter Mark Isham (here in concert tonight at TLA)

His girlfriend died four days earlier, just collapsed at their bedside in the middle of the night, and T-Model Ford is hurting bad. Real bad. He talks about his beloved Jessie until his lined face wrinkles with pain. "The finest woman I ever had in my life," he says sadly, thumbing through scratched Polaroids of her at the car-repair garage where he helps out when not playing his guitar. Ford is an old-time bluesman, little-known except in the Mississippi Delta. There, in small towns that dot flat fields of cotton, he plays ramshackle juke joints on weekends and scrapes together a meager existence in the hard-living, hard-luck blues tradition.

I've been eagerly awaiting a couple of first-degree blues burners to devastate the landscape. One was Philly fave Tommy Conwell's second major label album. It's a set I'd hoped would capture more of the raw, blues rock excitement witnessed in Conwell's mesmerizing, walking-on-the-tables live performances. The other was a once-in a-lifetime (literally) album pairing of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his brother Jimmie. Years in the talking, but only weeks in the making, this collaboration was intended as a radical career move away from the brothers' own groups (Stevie's Double Trouble, Jimmie's Fabulous Thunderbirds)

Stevie Ray Vaughan had been dreaming about the gig for months - a Blues Summit concert with his guitar-slinging buddies Robert Cray and Eric Clapton, under the stars at the Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wis. How sad that the show would prove his last. After the Alpine concert before 30,000 people Sunday night, Vaughan went down in a helicopter crash that also took the lives of Eric Clapton's highly regarded agent Bobby Brooks, bodyguard Nigel Browne and aide Colin Smythe.