Turner’s Return

Ike Turner is featured in an amazing performance at a French Blues & Jazz Festival.

Ike Turner credited Joe Louis Walker with encouraging him to return to his roots in blues music. He played guitar and assisted in production on Walker’s 1997 album Great Guitars and toured internationally with him. Walker paid him $5,000 a night for six songs. The positive response to the tour encouraged Turner to reform the Kings of Rhythm, embarking on a US tour in 2001 with his new wife Jeanette as vocalist which led to the recording and releasing of the 2001 album “Here & Now”.

He had recorded with the key R&B record labels of the 1950s and 1960s, including Chess, Modern, Trumpet, and Flair. With the Ike & Tina Revue he graduated to larger labels Blue Thumb and United Artists. Ike won two Grammy Awards and was nominated for three others over the course of his career. Alongside his former wife, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Allegations by Tina Turner in her autobiography of her abusive relationship with Ike and the film adaptation of this coupled with his cocaine addiction damaged his career in the 1980s and 1990s. Addicted to cocaine for at least 15 years, Turner was convicted of drug offenses, serving seventeen months in prison between July 1989 and 1991. He spent the rest of the 1990s free of his addiction, but relapsed in 2004. Near the end of his life he returned to live performance as a frontman and produced two award-winning albums returning to his blues roots. Frequently referred to as a ‘great innovator’ by his contemporaries, Ike Turner was once described as ‘the cornerstone of modern day rock ‘n’ roll’ by the editor-in-chief of Mojo magazine.

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