Music

Blues crusader gets a bigger sword

by Ted Drozdowski

Teo Leyasmeyer's been waving a banner for the blues for years. "I'm very aware of education and increasing people's understanding of the music as part of my personal mission," says Leyasmeyer, who is the booking agent for Harvard Square's House of Blues.

Now Leyasmeyer has a chance to take his ambitions worldwide as a member of the advisory board for the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of blues music. It provides aid to needy artists, serves as a parent organization for more than 100 blues societies, has created a Hall of Fame, and runs education programs and the annual W.C. Handy Awards program -- the blues' equivalent of the Grammys.

Insiders say Leyasmeyer -- who played piano and toured with Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Johnny Copeland, and other blues greats before he began booking New York City's Abilene Café in the late '80s -- was nominated to the position by Tommy Couch, president of Mississippi-based soul/blues label Malaco Records. Among the 26 members of the advisory board are Newton's Richard "Rosy" Rosenblatt, president of Tone-Cool Records; performers Bonnie Raitt, Ruth Brown, John Hammond, and John Fogerty; and industry giants Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun.

Leyasmeyer has booked the Harvard Square club for seven of its eight years. He also continues to play piano with the likes of Sherman Robertson, G- Love and Special Sauce, Tracy Nelson, and Hubert Sumlin when his schedule permits.

Broadly, Leyasmeyer says he feels his board membership will put him in a better position to "try to inform a generally commercially driven culture about the true place of the blues as America's greatest art form -- raising the level of consciousness." He also hopes to deepen the House of Blues's commitment to the foundation and the music, and to lobby for corporate sponsorship of programs involving needy artists.