Argentinian blues guitarist Ivan Singh has found his place in Chicago
Chicago blues has always been bigger than the city. The music is a wide-ranging traveler’s log, filled with the heart and soul of the Mississippi Delta and tales of the Great Migration. It’s a passport stamp showing how the sound found its way to the UK and influenced the British Invasion. Today, it manifests as a mecca for curious explorers like Ivan Singh.
The 33-year-old blues musician hails from a world away in Cordoba, Argentina, but ever since he was a child raised with a soundtrack of Buddy Guy and Howlin’ Wolf along with B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and guitar wizard Carlos Santana, he’s had his sights set on the blues capital of Chicago.
“It was like a Disney dream to come to Chicago,” Singh said. “I felt like it was a university to come to and learn from the masters and then try to figure out my own path.” Singh made his first trip as a fan in 2017 after hearing about the globally recognized Chicago Blues Festival, paying for it with money he saved from teaching guitar lessons in South America, and was soon immersed in the scene.
“The blues community was so nice to me when I first came here,” Singh recalled, expressing gratitude for luminaries and early allies like Rosa’s Lounge owner Tony Mangiullo and Buddy Guy. They were intrigued by what Singh was dishing out — a unique blend of Latin blues sung in Spanglish and played on a homemade guitar he calls the “Lata de Batata” (a can of sweet potatoes) — and offered invitations to take the stage and jam.
“To them, it was funny because I had a four-string made from a sweet potato can box,” Singh said, recalling how he made the instrument with one of his guitar students in Argentina after realizing he needed something small and light to travel with overseas. “Everybody was like, ‘What is that guitar?’ And I think they would just let me play out of curiosity. But then they were like, ‘Oh, this is kind of cool.’”
Nowadays, Singh has amplified his arsenal and also works with Gibson Guitars, wielding the instrument to create his unique music style (rounded out by a six-piece band and horn section) that offers a kaleidoscopic mirage of his learned experience.
His musical journey begins with his mother, a doctor who loves the blues. Although she hailed from a more rural area in northern Argentina, where access to modern music was limited, she discovered Led Zeppelin.
“When she was 16 or 17, she went crazy for it. And, of course, Led Zeppelin was covering a bunch of blues songs on their albums, and she’d ask her friends from Buenos Aires, ‘Can you bring me albums by Howlin’ Wolf?’ She really felt connected to the music.”
Fast forward to the ‘90s, when Singh was born, and the blues had a boom in South America as legendary acts from America came on repeat tour dates and figures like the late Argentine blues/rock/psych guitarist and songwriter Pappo (whom even B.B. King considered to be one of the best) emerged, borrowing from blues traditions to make it his own.
“He was one of my biggest influences,” Singh said of Pappo, bringing a similar multicultural mix to his own songs like “Somos Musica” and “Dame Un Beso,” from Singh’s self-titled 2019 debut.
“I was kind of scared to sing in Spanish at first. I was trying to respect the original lyrics of the classics, but people loved it when I started singing in Spanish,” Singh said.
Chicago musicians like John Primer also encouraged Singh to stay the course. “He would always tell me, ‘Son, you gotta tell your own story. Don't try to be somebody else. Because that's the blues, you tell your own story,’” Singh said. “I felt like Latin blues was my own path I could carve, of being Latino and coming from a Spanish-speaking country with this music that I love. That’s the blues to me — there are no language barriers, it’s just a feeling.”
Trusting those instincts has served Singh well. In 2021, it led him to move to Chicago permanently, and by 2024, he had a full-circle moment playing the Chicago Blues Festival that first brought him here. In 2023, another big moment came when Singh traveled to India with Guy, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Taj Mahal to play the notable Mahindra Blues Festival.
But Singh will always be a local staple. Over the next few weeks, he’s got gigs at SPACE in Evanston (Feb. 2), Fitzgeralds (Feb. 28) and Buddy Guy’s Legends (March 7), where he will be performing new music from an album scheduled to come out later this year. Among the newer tunes is a song called “Chicago,” a tribute to his now “Sweet Home.”
“I’ve traveled a lot, but I’ve never felt what I feel here in Chicago,” he said. “I came here to try to make my dreams come true, and what I love about the city is it welcomes everybody, no matter where you're from.”