A son of blues comes home

When Sumito Ariyoshi, known as Ariyo, arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1983, he came for several reasons that were actually just one reason: He wanted to eat, sleep, breathe and live the blues.

He wanted to play piano with the real bluesmen.

As Ariyo tells it, he showed up one night at the B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted, a North Side club. There he found a couple of real bluesmen in the flesh, Kansas City Red and Eddie C. Campbell, tuning up for their weekly gig.

Ariyo, then 26 years old and struggling to learn English, walked up to Kansas City Red.

"I'm from Japan," Ariyo said, breaking off each word to be understood clearly. "I play blues!"

The rest, as they say, is history. Ariyo joined the band for a song (a straight shuffle in the key of E major), then another. Before he knew it, he had played the entire set. Kansas City Red gave him a $5 bill and invited him back the next weekend, he said.

Thinking back on that day, Ariyo, now a youthful-looking 51-year-old with full, black hair that stands straight up, laughed softly. He paused to find the words to go with the memory.

"People always ask me if I saved that $5 bill," he said, grinning. "No, man, I spent it on some fried noodles."

Born in Kyoto in 1957, Ariyo grew up mostly in the Josho-ji temple, where his grandfather was a Buddhist monk, he said. Though his parents were middle-class, Ariyo received classical piano training from the age of three, a practice more common for wealthier families in Japan, he said.

He hated it.

"I felt handcuffed by classical piano," Ariyo said. "I felt like it was for a woman."

When he was 16 years old, Ariyo heard his first blues song, Elmore James's version of "Dust My Broom." It changed his life. Unlike classical style, the piano playing sounded rowdy, percussive and fun.

"I couldn't believe how the piano player was spanking the keys," Ariyo said.

Feeling freed from what he considered the daintiness of classical piano, Ariyo began listening to blues records and tailoring his own sound after the legendary Otis Spann.

Nearly 35 years later, Ariyo has established his place at the proverbial table of Chicago blues. After his initial break with Kansas City Red, Ariyo was asked to tour with the late Jimmy Rogers, former guitarist with Muddy Waters, in 1984. He also played piano for Valerie Wellington, one of Chicago's rising stars until she died of a brain aneurysm in 1993.

In 1987, Ariyo became the first Asian musician to play at the Chicago Blues Festival. That same year, he became the first Asian to record for Alligator Records, he said.

Perhaps his biggest break came when he was invited to tour Europe with Otis Rush in the summer of 1988. Touring France, Spain, Italy and Holland, Ariyo crossed paths with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, B.B. King and Dave Brubeck.

"I was honored to meet them," Ariyo said, "but, I mean, I was playing with Otis Rush."

But when the tour was over, he was not admitted back into the United States because of work visa issues, he said. He was forced to return to Japan.

For most of the 1990s, Ariyo stayed in Kyoto with his wife, Yasuyo. He formed his own band, Ariyo's Shuffle, played clubs and refined his style, mixing traditional blues piano with skills gleaned from his classical training.

Ariyo and Yasuyo returned to Chicago for good in 2002. Two years later, their son, Kibito, was born.

Now, Ariyo plays with Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues at Artis's Lounge on the South Side every Monday night. On Thursday nights, he accompanies the James Wheeler Blues Jam at Rosa's Lounge in Humboldt Park.

David Whiteis, critic and author of "Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories," published in 2006, has praised Ariyo's ability to improvise within the 12-bar blues, pushing the boundaries of the genre while respecting the tradition.

"To lose his presence in the Chicago blues world would be to leave a serious gap in the ongoing continuum of this city's blues piano heritage, from the roots to the future," Whiteis wrote in a biographical sketch on Rosa's website.

Still, after all of his accomplishments and critical praise, Ariyo does not consider himself a real bluesman. Instead, he thinks of himself as a blues musician.

"A bluesman just feels it," Ariyo said. "It is more training and knowledge with a musician."

But earlier this month, Ariyo mesmerized the crowd at Rosa's, banging his keys, delicately trickling out melodies, swinging his torso. Standing up, sitting down, looking pained, looking joyful, closing his eyes, laughing out loud, and staggering the last note of a frame before flooding into the next one in a suspenseful play of tension and release, he sure looked and sounded like he was feeling it too.