Pop : Pianist Dupree, 80, Eases Time Barriers

It would be easy to write off blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree as ancient history. He’s a small, frail man of 80 who has spent the last 30 years living in Europe, playing largely in a style that dates to before the Depression. But in a lively early set at McCabe’s on Saturday, Dupree dismissed that notion as easily as he tickled the 88s.

In two mournful blues dealing with his having been orphaned at age 1 when his parents died in a Ku Klux Klan-set fire, he erased all time barriers. His pain--carried both in his words and voice and in the lagging, funereal beat--was as current and real as John Lennon’s primal therapy, and far more real than what most rappers claiming to portray “reality” have produced.

More often Dupree was upbeat, bawdily joking with the audience and his guitarist Kenn Lending and playing his New Orleans barrelhouse boogie-woogie, which influenced such later innovators as Professor Longhair and Fats Domino. That would be enough to qualify him as an overlooked national treasure. The depth of his personalized blues makes him much more.