blues Archive
01 Apr 2021
30 Days Out, April 2021 #1: Alexa Rose, Brie Capone, David LaMotte, Eric Gales
I’ll spare you the April Fools Day jokes and instead move on to letting you know about foru live-and-in-person music performances happening in the next 30 days in Asheville. Three are locally-based artists (who customarily tour pretty widely), so not only are these opportunities to see live music, they represent a sampling of the best
19 Mar 2021
Hundred-word Reviews, March 2021
Hey, kids: collect ’em all! Five new albums, all highly recommended. Here’s the lowdown on each, in exactly 100 words per. Maxwell Farrington & Le SuperHomard – Once If you’re at all like me, you often find yourself sitting around pondering this age-old question: “What would it sound like if Lee Hazlewood recorded an album
18 Mar 2021
John “Blues” Boyd: Even After a 50 Year Detour, the Blues Was Still Calling (Part 3 of 3)
Continued from Part Two… And the remaining songs were written expressly to fit right alongside those Boyd-penned tunes. One of the players assembled for The Real Deal’s sessions, blues harpist Rick Estrin wrote “I Am the Real Deal,” the album’s opening track. “Rick Astrin also wrote ‘Dona Mae’ for me,” he says. For What My
17 Mar 2021
John “Blues” Boyd: Even After a 50 Year Detour, the Blues Was Still Calling (Part 2 of 3)
Continued from Part One… “She had grown up in Pompano Beach, but she left there, gone to New York City and married,” Boyd recalls. Dona Mae was up North some 15 years before leaving her husband, returning to Florida and moving back in with her mother. “When I came to Florida, I was young,” Boyd
16 Mar 2021
John “Blues” Boyd: Even After a 50 Year Detour, the Blues Was Still Calling (Part 1 of 3)
One of the more intriguing blues releases of late is What My Eyes Have Seen by 75-year old singer and songwriter John “Blues” Boyd. But despite his years, Mississippi-born Boyd has only been a professional musician for just over a decade. Yet in that short period, he’s been making up for time. Johnny James Boyd
17 Feb 2021
Hundred-word Reviews: February 2021, Part 2
These five fall loosely – okay, sometimes very loosely – into the progressive and jazz categories. The Mastelottos – Too Much Happiness Though Robert Fripp’s recent video series with pulchritudinous wife Toyah Willcox have shown that he, too has a sense of humor and a light touch, it’s King Crimson’s Pat Mastelotto who perhaps reigns
09 Feb 2021
Album Review: Ron Thompson – From the Patio
For more than a decade, guitarist Ron Thompson was a regular fixture at San Jose, California’s famed Poor House Bistro. As this album’s brief liner note essay by the club’s owner Jay Meduri points out, Thompson could always be counted on to show up for Wednesday night gigs. Selections from two of those Wednesdays –
07 Feb 2021
Seth Walker Opens Up
This feature was first published in Bold Life Magazine. Seth Walker was born in a tiny town – really tiny – and was trained from an early age in classical music. So the fact that he ended up playing his own steeped-in-the-blues music is a bit surprising. But to the North Carolina-born songwriter and guitarist,
27 Jan 2021
Album Review: Johnny Iguana’s Chicago Spectacular!
Pianist Johnny Iguana (born Brian Berkowitz) may not have been born in Chicago, but he’s long since made the Windy City his home, and his understanding of Chicago blues is deep and finely textured. Iguana comes from – and is central to – a scene that extends beyond the blues; he’s grounded in punk, jazz,
16 Jan 2021
Album Review: Bobby Rush – Rawer Than Raw
At age 86, bluesman Bobby Rush has nothing left to prove. Recipient of a dozen Blues Music Awards and winner (for Porcupine Meat) of the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, Rush could be forgiven if he chose to rest on his laurels, looking back proudly on an impressive body of work that