Blue Notes: Bonnie Raitt

We are overdue in Hong Kong for something along the lines of the Timbre Rock & Roots festival to be held next month in Singapore. Although several of the artists are going on to gigs elsewhere in Asia and Australia, sadly none is making a detour here.

Among those appearing at the shows, which take place over two nights at Fort Canning Green on March 21 and 22, are Paul Simon, Robert Plant, Rufus Wainwright, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and two winners from this month's Grammy awards: Jimmy Cliff, who picked up best reggae album for Rebirth, and Bonnie Raitt, whose Slipstream was voted best Americana album. That's quite a bill.

Raitt's award was her 10th, but speaking a few days before the ceremony on February 10, she didn't expect to win. "Frankly nine Grammys is enough for anybody to have," she says.

Win she did, however: Slipstream, her first album on her own Redwing Records label, is among her best.

Her previous studio album, Souls Alike, came out in 2005, but she toured until 2010 when she was finally able to take significant time off from the road for the first time in 42 years. Unfortunately it wasn't just a holiday. She had lost her parents and her brother, after long illnesses but within a short period of time. She needed time to herself to process the grief, she says.

"I really was happy to have that one year completely away, but I started to miss [working] after a while, and it was really a thrill to start up again with [producer-songwriter] Joe Henry, with those first four songs that are included on Slipstream. That was a breakthrough for me to play with some other musicians after so many years with my guys."

Henry got Raitt working with some of his regular associates, including Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz on guitars, and those recordings have a spacey ambient feel which puts Raitt's soulful singing in a different context.

Slipstream has sold more than 250,000 copies, making it one of 2012's top-selling independent albums, with Raitt producing herself and working with her regular road band, the players who will appear with her in Singapore.

They are bassist James "Hutch" Hutchinson, drummer Ricky Fataar, guitarist George Marinelli, and organist/vocalist Mike Finnigan, who replaced singer-songwriter and virtuoso New Orleans-style pianist Jon Cleary when he left Raitt's band to focus on a solo career.

"I've had Hutch on the bass since 1983. He and Ricky have been the cornerstone of the records since Nick of Time [in 1989]. George is still on guitar since 1993, and Mike joined us for the Slipstream album and tour," Raitt says.

Raitt has won Grammys in the blues, pop and rock as well as Americana categories, but the deepest roots of her music are in the blues, which she learned from older artists, some of whom became close friends, including Sippie Wallace, Charles Brown, Ruth Brown, John Lee Hooker and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

However, she was also influenced by jazz, folk and country music, the Rolling Stones, and by contemporaries such as Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal and Little Feat.

Concurrently with Cooder and Little Feat's Lowell George she explored new territory on the electric slide guitar, drawing on the acoustic delta blues heritage to develop a style by turns subtly expressive and raunchily funky. "These guys were revolutionary in the way they were rhythmically deconstructing and reconstructing the music, and that's something I really admire. I'm not interested in recreating exact copies of the [old blues] music," she says.

Raitt and some of her peers have honed an idiosyncratic mixture of roots music styles into something coherent which is now referred to as Americana. Last year she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association.

She has earned the acclaim and, whatever you call her music, at 63 years old Raitt has much more of it in her yet.

Take Three

Three career milestone albums from Bonnie Raitt.

• Bonnie Raitt (1971, Warner Bros): "I think the reason I got my foot in the door and got my record deal is that there weren't that many women playing Robert Johnson songs," Raitt says of her debut album. "It was an unusual mix of songs I was doing, including those delta blues. It set me apart from the other women who were out there at the time."

• Nick of Time (1989, Capitol): Don Was produced one of the most successful comeback albums in history. It won three Grammy Awards, sold five million copies, and established the nucleus of the road band with which Raitt still plays. A stellar cast of guests includes Herbie Hancock, Paulinho Da Costa, David Crosby and Graham Nash.

• Silver Lining (2002, Capitol): Raitt's second album to be co-produced by Tchad Blake and Mitchell Froom shows Raitt at the top of her form on both vocals and guitar.