Camilo Restrepo offers a unique and powerful performance of blues and folk music. He engages audiences with his soulful voice and captivating guitar playing, delivering a truly unforgettable experience. With an extensive repertoire of classic songs, Camilo finds his place well at events ranging from international festivals to local bars .
The Delta Blues at the Drom
If you haven't been to the Drom Taberna yet and you are a lover of discovering new music you are missing out on a gold mine.
Every day you can go there and see between 2-4 artists there on a given night. This is the hub for artists to gather a new following. A good friend told me about an artist named Camilo Restrepo and being the melodious explorer that I am I went to see what got him excited.
He walked on stage quietly with just a guitar, sat back on his stool and with a cool laid back attitude and cool blue polka dot socks he began to pluck away. It wasn't until he opened his mouth that I really got it. It was like I shifted into a different realm. I was sitting in a swampy land in the tall grass and was witnessing an old spirit of the blues as his porch rocking voice carried me to the Deep South. It was the soul of the delta blues.
This was the birthplace, where that sound was born.
He opened with Crawling King snake, which was first recorded in 1941 by Big Joe Williams. He then moved on to Jack of Diamonds which is a gambling song popularized by Blind Lemon Jefferson. This is the stuff that blues legends were born from. These are dark song that carried a sense of bad intent or a warning. They came from a mystic suffering. In fact throughout Camilo's set, he kept singing about death. He sang, Death Letter Blues, Prayer of Death, and Death don't have no mercy. This was pretty heavy stuff for a Thursday after work. This may be why your bar tab was a little high that night.
If you are a fan of the blues, Camilo would pull out a lot of the classic players and lay them at your feet. I heard this evening, songs by Muddy Waters, Blind Willie, Robert Johnson and one of my favourites, RL Burnside. He threw in some Bessie Smith, John Lee Hooker and I noticed he favoured Mississippi John Hurt.
Once you have settled into his amazing voice that seemed to emerge from the swamps and earth, you will eventually realize when he gets into a groove; his finger picking abilities will have you in its clutches as well. Not only can it look complex, but the shear dimensions he can create will mesmerize you. I spoke to a few people in the audience between sets and they simply told me they come back again and again just to see him. I do believe he is a staple at the Drom because he mentioned that this is his favourite place to play.
His second set was filled with plenty of other great artists and interesting songs. The mood seemed a little lighter as well. He played songs like, Jelly,Jelly,Jelly and Candy man. It was a far cry from his death songs from the first set. If you did have a few shots by the first set, then maybe Fallin' down blues is a song you need not listen to. I really did love his version of Nobody's fault but mine, made popular by Led Zeppelin. He finished of the evening with the legend of Robert Johnson and sang Preachin' Blues.
I am not sure how long Camilo has been on the scene, but this is one of those artists you will kick yourself for missing. If you are a musical adventurer like myself, add this guy to your must see list. Once you see him, it will not be the only time you see him.
He is a truly hidden gem amongst the crazy noise that Toronto can make in this world of music.
Joe Taylor
Blast Toronto
Camilo Restrepo and the Delta Blues
8 July 2024
By Julian Samuel
During my high school years in Toronto my friends and I used to obsessively visit the Cedarbrae library because it had an extensive jazz and blues collection. While flipping through the LP stacks we’d trip up on musicians we’d never heard of before such as Robert Johnson. Quickly, we learnt that the foundation of Chicago blues, and rock-and-roll is Delta blues.
According to Wikipedia, the main proponents of Delta blues, were: Freddie Spruel, Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey, Big Joe Williams, Garfield Akers, Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. Back in the day, we listened to Robert Johnson the most.
Although acoustic three-cord 12-bar blues is an arid form, it became an endless source of inspiration for us. We formed amateur blues bands, played at friends’ houses, and once we did a gig at Grossman’s Tavern on Spadina. The egg rolls were awful. Frequently, we’d go to The Colonial Tavern on Yonge Street to see mythic figures such Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Willy Dixon, T Bone Walker, James Cotton, Roland Kirk, and Betty Carter. It was chilling to see Muddy’s band walk on the stage, and without a count down, start a robust jazz infiltrated blues instrumental. In a dream, I saw Little Walter playing there.
Years went by, we all went our separate ways. I moved to Peterborough to study at Trent university and later moved to Montreal for further studies. In 2015, I moved back to Toronto where Cameron and Andrea put on summer backyard concerts at their place in the city’s East End. On a June evening with a blue sky, I heard Camilo Restrepo playing Delta blues on his Gibson Southern Jumbo. The Delta was in front of me again.
Restrepo, newly arrived in Canada via Chicago and Bogota sat down on a small raised stage and played for an attentive audience of about sixteen people. We heard Delta covers, Spirituals and Doc Watson covers. He occasionally used a porcenalized ceramic slide on the guitar strings. This made a sound cleaner than the bottle neck slide that Muddy used.
Days later after his music had sunk in, I chatted with Restrepo. Initially, he formed blues groups but found the experience heart-breaking. He took a three year hiatus, returning as a solo act. He’s classically trained; he knows about Shostakovich and modernism, has an emotional and technical familiarity with Jimi Hendrix, knows minutiae about Delta figures: the early blues musicians played Stella guitars he told me. For Restrepo, the Delta is haunting and far more complex than its apparent structure. Musicians are sometimes tempted to modify the music to cater to modern sensitivities: guitars that are made today are technically more refined than those of the previous era. So while attempting to recreate music resembling the original recordings of the 1920s and 30s, contemporary guitars, and the musicians playing them, create an overall sound which is texturally distinct. He doesn’t have a trace of naiveté on racism and music. I bet he’ll be booked in places like The Rex, The Cameron House and the Mariposa folk festival. We are lucky to have him in Toronto.
That June night, he did a stunning rendition of R.L. Burnside’s “Poor Black Mattie.” His touch on the guitar is delicate, forceful, and loving. His voice is operatically clear, and in line with his mighty fat Gibson which he percussively thuds to lay emphasis to a riff or a lyric. Painfully, some songs recall an era of fiscal tyranny in the American south.
Restrepo played thirty-one songs with unforgettable confidence.
