Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Sean Costello is sitting in the cramped dressing room of Terra Blues, a second-floor walkup blues club in New York's Greenwich Village, in between sets on a weekday night. The money isn't good and the crowd is worse, but Costello is having a great time. The 22-year-old guitarist is doing what he wants, playing the music he loves the way he wants it to sound, following in the footsteps of his heroes. Advertisement Costello is a prodigy. Capable guitarists are a dime a dozen, but he has something the rest of the wunderkind seldom have. Call it poise, savvy or soul, his playing is more than just a technical exercise. He can feel the contours of the blues comfortably, like a night stalker in the dark. Costello grew up in mostly black Philadelphia-area neighborhoods, where he discovered a passion for black history in an unusual way. Advertisement "I was in third grade," he recalls. "I wasn't really doing that well at school, and somehow, I don't remember how this got worked out, but one of the teachers assigned me to read Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech at elementary school. I didn't memorize it from the page, I memorized it from the tape, getting his pattern of speech down, I was really into it. I was really pumped up about it. It went over big at the elementary school and then we took it to the high school. "I just got up there in this suit and my step dad's tie that went down to my knees and when I did it everybody just kind of freaked out and I got a standing ovation. The drama of the speech really appealed to me. I did understand what it meant. I remember being fascinated with it. I was really shaken up, passionate about it." A year later, when he moved with his family to Atlanta, Costello became heavily involved in playing music. After mastering the classic rock canon and aspiring to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, Costello experienced an epiphany as a 12-year-old when he picked up a second-hand record by Howlin' Wolf. Advertisement "It was the hippest thing I'd ever heard," Costello recalls. "His guitar player, Hubert Sumlin, was a revelation." Costello immediately began to refashion his approach to the guitar, learning to play with nuance and swing. He drank in the classic blues players and picked up ideas from Otis Rush and Johnny Taylor records. He studied New Orleans guitarist Earl King's extraterrestrial tunings. Then he boiled it all down to something he could call his own. "I played a lot more acoustic when I was younger. I think for a while I was really better at the country blues stuff. A lot of my electric playing is based on people like Jimmy Rogers and Robert Lockwood, a lot of it is based on that traditional Chicago-up-from-the-delta-sound." Costello soon became a presence on the Atlanta blues scene, sitting in frequently with local bluesman Felix Reyes' band Felix And The Cats. At 15, Costello won the 1994 Blues Talent Contest sponsored by the Memphis Beale Street Blues Society, where he met Susan Tedeschi. Costello began working with his own band in earnest, touring behind James Cotton, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Pinetop Perkins, and Bo Diddley. In 1996 he released his first album, "Call the Cops." In eventually joined Tedeschi's group as lead guitarist and recorded her debut album, which launched both players into instant headliner status on the blues circuit. Advertisement Costello was too hot to be the hired gun, though, and went right back to fronting his own group. Michael Rothschild of Landslide records -- the local label that launched such legendary Atlanta groups as Tinsley Ellis, Col. Bruce Hampton and Widespread Panic -- signed Costello and released the terrific "Cuttin' In" in 2000. But "Moanin' For Molasses," Costello's latest album, is his true "arrival" disc, a major statement from a blues master who's still growing and is likely to be around for a long time. And now he's picking up his Gibson Les Paul gold top and musing about what it's like to live your dream, paying dues in blues clubs across the country. "It teaches you how to be consistent as a performer," he says, "to be patient as a person, how to play in front of a lot of different kinds of people in different situations. I remember it was very difficult to focus on playing immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, it just teaches you how to play for any kind of audience in any conditions. "Like in this place they want me to turn my amp practically down to zero, so you have to learn how to perform in any climate. It teaches you to live within your limits in terms of health. Advertisement "It's really kind of a rigorous lifestyle. It's my only frame of reference. I've learned everything from being on the road. It's hard for me to be objective about it because it's all I know." Along the way he's gotten sage advice from some of the best in the business. "I've talked to a lot of people and gotten general life lessons. People tell me what they would have done differently. I remember Bobby Bland saying that maybe he wouldn't have drank so much and stayed away from the drugs. From people like Robert Lockwood I got the advice to watch out for the record labels. You hear such random things at random times. I learned a few lessons from watching people work, like Bobby Bland is at a point now where he gets his money before he goes on stage. "I've always been told to keep doing what I'm doing. For the most part all the older blues players I've played with have sort of taken a liking to me, because I pay respect to them and I try to play in the traditional style, you know, play it as right as I can. Everybody from B.B. King to James Cotton and Pinetop Perkins have all been very encouraging, they kind of put their arm around me and say 'Just keep doing what you're doing, but watch out for this and that.'" Advertisement Costello is confident that there's no real competition out there. I don't feel any competition with anybody except myself," he concludes. "I just want to be the fullest songwriter and singer I can be." The guitar playing will take care of itself.
