Hey Keb', Mumbai wants Mo' to beat the blues

In place of a fedora hat, a baseball cap peddling 'Peace, love & rock-n-roll' sits on his song-writing head and in place of a guitar or a Grammy, his gifted hands are gripping the steering handle of an imaginary auto-rickshaw at the moment. Seated on the terrace of a BKC five-star, Americana artiste Kevin Moore aka Keb' Mo' - who is in Mumbai for the second time to perform at the Mahindra Blues Fest - even gently pushes the cold air in front of him twice as he pretends to honk."I want to drive a three-wheel taxi," says the 68-year-old Nashville-based singer, guitarist, and songwriter, who wouldn't do it for two simple reasons. He doesn't know how to drive on the left side of the road and then, there's the chaos of Mumbai's traffic, which make both his musical hands wind drunkenly at the prospect of navigating it.

"But," admits Moore, "there's an order within the chaos". He is still talking about rugged Mumbai roads though the same could be said about his sumptuous breakfast plate from this morning. A textural hodgepodge of chickpeas, eggs, dal and chicken, it contained enough spices to appeal to the taste of this meticulous, diversity-seeking blues artiste who has turned winning Grammys into something of a habit.
Five Grammy awards now peep from a high shelf in his living room, including one that he earned this year for his latest album 'Oklahoma'. But today, as the tall, silver-goatee-sporting Moore goofily raises both his hands for the camera while posing with fellow musicians or genially offers to fill your empty glass with water first, Keb' Mo' transmits the aura of someone who doesn't take himself too seriously even though he has five gramophone-shaped reasons to.
"The Grammy is not for me," says Moore. "It's for other people. It's for the onlookers," says the blues and Americana artiste, confessing that there is no "secret" to winning the coveted award. "I just do what I do. I am kinda crazy and meticulous," says the singer-songwriter, putting the success of his songs down to intention and attention to detail. The first time he won a Grammy, Moore thought he simply got lucky. "But it hits you harder every time you win. It humbles me," he says.
What also grounds him - albeit spiritually - is his famous nickname Keb' Mo'. With the same childlike glint that he radiates in an annoyingly adorable video of a song called 'Christmas is annoying', Kevin Moore clarifies that he is "not from England" unlike what his official moniker suggests. At some uncertain point in the nineties, people had reduced Kevin Moore's name to the affectionate Keb' Mo' and the nickname stuck. "It feels like my real name," says Moore. "It sounds more African."
So does his latest album 'Oklahoma', which won the Grammy for best Americana album and contains a mention of Greenwood, a neighbourhood known as 'Black Wall Street' containing many African-American businesses that was wiped out in one of the most brutal massacres in the history of US race relations. "Oklahoma is a microcosm for all the issues of every state in the US," says Moore, whose latest album touches not only upon immigration and women's rights, but also upon lighter subjects as the state's weather and chicken sauce.
For Moore, who grew up far away from Oklahoma, childhood sounded like gospel music till he heard the blues records that were played on an ancient German stereo in his first cousin Prentiss's home. "I was nine or ten years old. We would go to his place every Sunday after church," recalls Moore, who fondly calls his triumvirate of musical gods - Taj Mahal (Henry Saint Claire Fredericks), Bonny Ray and Big Bill Broonzy - "the big three". If he worships Broonzy for being a pure Mississippi blues musician who never changed, Moore admires Taj Mahal for putting his personal spin on the blues while respecting the culture and history of the genre. Ray, on the other hand, taught him the value of variety - a quality whose eternal pursuit makes Moore call himself a "blank musician". "I have no genre," he smiles. "I have freedom."