Adam Gussow and Charlie Hilbert are one of the most dynamic harmonica-guitar blues duos on the scene today, mixing traditional Mississippi and Chicago blues with Latin jazz ("Watermelon Man"), New Orleans funk ("Cissy Strut"), and Stevie Ray Vaughan ("Cold Shot"). Each man brings a long track-record to the collaboration--Gussow as half of the legendary Harlem blues duo Satan & Adam, Hilbert as a veteran of the New York City blues scene and a sideman with Nat Riddles, Lorraine LaRocka, the Skyla Burrell Band, Mike Dugan, and others.
Gussow and Hilbert first met 25 years ago when Hilbert was working the streets of New York with Riddles and Gussow was taking lessons from the harmonica master. In the late 1990s, after Riddles' death, the two teamed up and worked clubs in the Tri-State region, becoming regulars at NYC's Chicago Blues. In the last several years, although separated by 1500 miles, they have toured the Northeast in support of Gussow's book, Journeyman's Road and traveled to Klingenthal, Germany, where they headlined the 2008 Mundharmonika-live Festival. They have also released two albums on the Modern Blues Harmonica label: Blues Classics (2007) and Live in Klingenthal (2009).
As a blues harmonica player and teacher, Adam Gussow has few peers in the business. Currently an Associate Professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi with a specialty in blues literature and culture, Gussow has for many years performed and recorded with Mississippi-born guitarist and one-man-band Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee as the duo Satan and Adam. After working the streets of Harlem from 1986 to 1991, Gussow and Magee duo toured internationally between 1991 and 1998. They played the Chicago Blues Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, The King Biscuit Blues Festival, the Kansas City Jazz & Blues Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival and RiverBlues Festival, and more, along with hundreds of club gigs. They released two albums on Flying Fish Records, including the W. C. Handy-nominated Harlem Blues (1991) and Mother Mojo (1993). Later releases include Living on the River (1996) and, on the Modern Blues Harmonica label, Word on the Street: Harlem Street Recordings, 1989 (2008).
In 1996 Satan and Adam were the cover story in Living Blues magazine; Gussow was, according to editor David Nelson, "the first white blues musician to be so prominently spotlighted in the magazine's 26-year history." Gussow was one of the first amplified blues players, in the late 1980s to make overblows a key element of his stylistic approach, adapting Howard Levy's innovations in a way that helped usher in a new generation of overblow masters such as Jason Ricci and Chris Michalek. According to a reviewer for American Harmonica Newsletter, Gussow's playing is characterized by "technical mastery and innovative brilliance that comes along but once in a generation." Lately, inspired by Magee, Gussow has begun to gig occasionally as a one-man band.
Gussow is known to harmonica students around the world as a result of his "dirty-South blues harp channel" at YouTube and his pioneering offerings in the field of digital-download video tutorials at his website, Modern Blues Harmonica. He is also the author of three blues-themed books: Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998; reissued in 2009); Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2002); and Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives From Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (2007).
Adam Gussow and Charlie Hilbert - "She Moves Me" (2008)
Adam Gussow - "Superstition" (2009)
Satan and Adam - "Big Boss Man" (2008)
Satan and Adam - "Will It Go Round In Circles" (1993)
