Daniel Ira Kalb (September 9, 1942 – November 19, 2022) was an American blues guitarist and vocalist. He was an original member of the 1960s group the Blues Project.
Kalb was born in Brooklyn but raised in Mount Vernon, New York, in Westchester County, the son of a lawyer father and a homemaker mother. Like British kids who picked up on the blues after seeing blues musicians live, Kalb had a revelatory moment when he first heard John Lee Hooker perform "Tupelo," about the great 1920s flood in Tupelo, Mississippi. The year was 1964, Kalb recalled in a 2009 interview, "...and the whole performance was just so mesmerizing, I didn't think about race matters, I didn't think about anything, I just knew that in my reaction to this great musician, that suddenly, the blues had tapped me on the shoulder. I didn't even know where it was going to lead me, but I knew I wanted to play this music."
Kalb had already been messing around with guitar by the time he saw Hooker. At the age of 15 Kalb formed the band Gay Notes and performed with Bob Dylan on a WBAI-FM concert broadcast in 1961. When he got back to Mount Vernon he began to accelerate the pace of his guitar lessons and he looked up Dave Van Ronk, who was then living in Greenwich Village. Van Ronk's music was being played on several then-underground FM radio stations around New York City, and in 1963 he took the train down to Washington Square Park the following Sunday to find Van Ronk. They both performed in the Ragtime Jug Stompers. In1964 he recorded as Folk Stringers, produced by guitarist and writer Sam Charters, who has written: "It was generally conceded that Kalb was the most exciting of the new players." In 1964 Kalb played second guitar on Phil Ochs's album All the News That's Fit to Sing and in 1964 appeared on Judy Collins's Fifth Album.
As he continued to develop his skills on acoustic and electric guitars, Kalb realized that electric rock & roll music would soon eclipse the folk and blues renaissance that had been going on in the first half of the '60s, so in 1965 he formed the Blues Project with Steve Katz, Andy Kulberg, Roy Blumenfeld and Tommy Flanders. Flanders later left the band and was replaced by Al Kooper, who later went on to a successful solo career. Other original founding members also included Artie Traum and Tommy Flanders. The Blues Project's first album, Live at the Café Au Go Go, sold in excess of 100,000 copies the year it was released, signaling that Kalb and Kooper's instincts were correct about blues-rock eclipsing acoustic blues and folk music.
In 1965 the Blues Project performed an eleven-minute rendition of Muddy Waters's "Two Trains Running" in electronic form, with Waters in the audience. When asked what he thought of it, Waters said, "You really got me." Kalb later said, "If I'd dropped dead at that point on the spot because of what we thought of Muddy Waters, then my life would have been well spent." Personality clashes, drugs and the 1960s lifestyle took their toll on the band. The group played to sold-out crowds in San Francisco and three massive Central Park concerts in New York City in 1966. In 1968 Kalb released the album Crosscurrents with Stefan Grossman.
After the Blues Project had pretty much run their course as a group by 1972 or so, Kalb began to establish a career as a solo artist, but he was fairly quiet for the next twenty years, but joined Al Kooper for a Blues Project reunion, recorded at the Bottom Line in 1996. In the 21st century, Kalb performed solo acoustic gigs, played acoustic and electric music with the Danny Kalb Trio, including Bob Jones on acoustic bass and Mark Ambrosino on drums and occasionally performed with Stefan Grossman and Steve Katz and with his brother Jonathan Kalb.
His live shows usually included some of the Blues Project songs that had always been part of his repertoire, and he typically worked with a trio that included drummer Mark Ambrosino and bassist Bob Jones. Kalb recorded a terrific studio album for Sojourn Records, I'm Gonna Live the Life I Sing About (2008), which received critical acclaim in the blues media. This was followed in 2013 by Kalb's first double-CD Moving in Blue, also on the Sojourn label, featuring various sidemen and guest artists. With this album he parlayed the full range of his musical interests and creativity.
His earlier releases under his own name are available on compact disc, and include Livin' with the Blues (1990), All Together, Now (2003), and Live in Brooklyn! (2006). Originally issued in 1969, the Danny Kalb-Stefan Grossman duo outing Crosscurrents was re-released by Collectables in 2005. Kalb died on November 19, 2022 in Brooklyn, New York after a protracted battle with cancer. He was 80 years old.
(Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia)