Los Fabulocos was first established in 2004 by its two founding members - singer/accordionist Jesus Cuevas and drummer Mike Molina – who initially formed their musical bond while working together as members of the East Los Angeles roots-rock band The Blazers. When bassist James Barrios signed on the following year in 2005, his passion for Bakersfield country music began to seep into the ever evolving musical gumbo that was already simmering on an even heat. When the final ingredient of blues guitarist Kid Ramos was added to the mix in 2007, the carefully crafted, home-brewed stew had unquestionably reached a boiling point.

 

Collection is a 2-CD compilation of tracks from Big Shanty, whose blistering sound has been described as everything from "death metal blues" to "heavy metal funk." The double-disc set also includes five previously out-of-print live tracks.

 

Best Traditional Blues Album: 

Pinetop Perkins and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, Joined at the Hip

Contemporary Blues Album
Buddy Guy, Living Proof

 

 

Other news of note to blues fans would be the win for the Carolina Chocolate Drops for Genuine Negro Jig and Jeff Beck's win for  Best Pop Instrumental Performance for Nessum Dorma.

 

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Dion Brown is the new Executive Director of the B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, Mississippi. He comes to the job from Wichita, Kansas where he has been Chief Operating Officer at Exploration Place, a hands-on science and children's museum which draws over 180,000 visitors a year.

Brown was hired by the Indianola museum after a seven-month search for a new director. His five-year experience at the Wichita museum has included all aspects of its operations. He has been leading a staff of 42.

Brown, 46, who grew up in Decatur, Illinois, retired from the Air Force in 2002 after serving 21 years.  

 

"I'm looking forward to working with the excellent team at the B.B. King Museum," said Brown. "It's an incredible museum and it has a remarkable reputation, and I hope to help lead it to even greater successes. I am equally looking forward to learning the rich history of the Delta and working alongside the people in this community."

 

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The Blues Foundation in Memphis, Tennessee, announced its 2011 inductees for the Blues Hall of Fame. The class of 2011 is led by Robert Cray, who helped to reignite the blues on the national scene in the 1980s and whose soulful guitar work has been a dominant force in blues ever since. Other inductees include singer-guitarist John Hammond, singer-songwriter Denise LaSalle, vocalists Big Maybelle and Alberta Hunter, and singer-songwriter J.B. Lenoir.

 

 

 

Blues music may be timeless, but when one of the genre's most iconic artists turns 100, it's still a cause for celebration.

 

Tonight, at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Big Head Blues Club celebrates the genre and commemorates what would have been the 100th birthday of blues music legend Robert Johnson with the Blues at the Crossroads: The Robert Johnson Centennial Concert tour.

 

Strathmore is just one of the stops on the national tour that coincides with the Feb. 1 release of Big Head Blues Club's album, 100 Years of Robert Johnson.

 

Big Head Blues Club is an ensemble of prominent blues musicians who together perform renditions of Johnson's iconic music for modern audiences.

 

The CD features 10 tracks of some of Johnson's best-known songs, including "Come On In My Kitchen," "Ramblin' On My Mind" and "When You Gotta Good Friend." Artists B.B. King, Charlie Musselwhite and Ruthie Foster are also featured on the record but are not part of the touring group.  

 

"It was a magical part of my life," said Todd Park Mohr, the lead vocalist and guitarist of Big Head Todd and the Monsters, who are featured on the record. "It only took three days in Memphis [to make the album]. There's just an overwhelming musical feeling in that place."

 

 

The organiser of the Australian Blues Music Festival said he is happy with how this year’s festival panned out but was looking to improve some aspects of it for next year.

 

“There is always room for improvement as far as I’m concerned but nothing needs to be fixed,” Geoff Bell from Laing Entertainment said.

 

“We’re getting there - we are growing. We have to evolve and find new ways of doing things, but personally - I had a ball and a lot of money was spent in town.”

 

He said next year he would like to see a jumping castle and rides for children in the park.

 

“I am looking to expand it next year and would like to get a corporate sponsor to put more attractions in the park for kids. To me the festival has to be inclusive for everyone,” he said.

 

Mr Bell said he was pleased with the overall quality of the acts and the turnout of people in the city.

 

“There was a lot of diversity for festival goers,” he said.

 

“I know that people came from New Zealand and the Northern Territory, but that numbers from Queensland and Victoria were down, understandably because of the floods.

 

“But there was a big increase in numbers from the ACT. We were targeting that area. It would be crazy not to market to Canberra with such a big population only an hour away.”

 

He said he had received a lot of feedback from festival goers.

 

“One suggestion I kept hearing was whether we could close the main street off in front of Belmore Park and to close Montague and Market streets as well and I will pursue this with Goulburn Mulwaree Council,” he said.

 

Mr Bell said there was plenty of variety on offer for punters.

 

“The stand out act for me was Dreamboogie. They were phenomenal. Also Halfway to Forth, Shaun Kirk, the Chris Harland Blues Band and Diana Wolfe and The Black Sheep,” he said.

 

 

After a 12-year run, there may not be a Riverhead Blues Festival this year – at least not in the parking lot by the Peconic River, where the event has been held on a weekend in July since 1998.

 

Bob Barta, president of the board of the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall – the non-profit organization which has run the event for the past four years – said he is “95 percent certain” that the festival will not return to downtown Riverhead.

 

Vail-Leavitt’s treasurer, Vince Tria, was even more emphatic. “It would take a miracle, and at this point, I don’t see it coming,” he said Tuesday.

 

Tria said, however, that the idea of holding the festival somewhere else is still very much on the table – promising, in fact, to have an announcement shortly.

 

“I’d say that within the next two or three weeks, we will have agreed on something,” Tria said. “We have a couple of alternatives. It’s a question of logistics, like parking accommodations and the like.”

 

Like Barta, Tria complained about the badgering he says he’s been getting from the town and the Business Improvement District.

 

“They’ve picked on us from day one about us hiding the money,” said Tria, whose music hall took over the festival in 2007 after the BID itself had been accused of financial irregularities.

 

Ray Pickersgill, president of the management committee of the BID and himself a former member of the Vail-Leavitt board, has long called on Barta and Tria to open the books. He has also been critical of Vail-Leavitt’s decision to start charging admission to the festival –  which used to be free – starting with $5 per person four years ago and increasing it to $10 two years ago.

 

 

In the summer of 1965, Bob Dylan made music history when he plugged it in. The folk hero played a set with electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival. So who gave Dylan this bright idea? A kid from Chicago named Michael Bloomfield. After that pivotal moment Bloomfield went on to experience both the highs and lows of the music business.

 

Eight Forty-Eight's Jason Marck shared his story:

 

Growing up on Chicago’s North Shore, Michael Bloomfield never really fit in. His only refuge was a guitar, and a transistor radio tuned to the blues on WVON. If Bloomfield’s radio opened a window to the blues, learning that his maid actually knew some of these blues legends blew open a door. Soon she was taking him to South Side clubs and introducing him to greats like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Otis Rush. Muddy became like a father to him. By the time he was 15, this pudgy, smart-aleky Jewish kid was on stage jamming with his idols.

 

Harmonica virtuoso Corky Siegel remembers it well.

 

"First time I met him, I was playing saxophone, and I sat in with him. And my partner Jim Schwall was his first harmonica player-that’s how far back I go with Bloomfield!" Siegel remembered, "But the scene, we were playing in this club, we didn’t know how wild it was-two little white kids playing in a black club till 3:00 in the morning…and the fact that all of these blues icons are coming in and out-but now I’m going 'Oh My God, what a thing!' Not only were we sitting in with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, they were sitting in with us! While we were learning how to play the blues! it was unbelievable!" delighted Siegel.

 

Michael Bloomfield was learning to play the blues and then some. By 1963 he was bringing the blues to the North Side, playing in various combos and booking artists in The Fickle Pickle and Big John’s. Blues-harp great Charlie Musslewhite was right there as it was all happening.

 

"Eventually they had live blues there every night of the week. You could see Little Walter, or Muddy, or the Wolf, and that started the whole thing of blues coming to the North Side. These clubs could pay more money and other clubs on the North Side were seeing the business that Big John’s was doing, and they started hiring blues," Musslewhite explained.

 

 

The greatest harmonica man to ever blow the blues, Little Walter died in his sleep on this day in 1968. He was only 37 years old, but Walter looked much older, his body and soul battered and bruised from hard loving and too many defeats.

 

Just exactly how he died is another of rock and roll’s great mysteries. And the rumors were always going to spring up surrounding Little Walter, one of the more colorful characters in the tough world of Chicago blues.

 

Well-known for his quick temper, Little Walter was a fighter and a brawler who took more beatings over the years then he ever delivered. Some say the final straw was a head-blow from the brother of one of Walter’s many lady friends. Others say he was smacked over the head with a lead pipe over a bad gambling debt.

 

Muddy Waters, whose common sense and level headedness rivaled his prodigious musical talent once said, “He’s real tough, Little Walter, and he’s had it hard. Got a slug in his leg right now!”

 

Little Walter’s face grew increasing scarred from fights and beatings in the ’60s. It wasn’t a kind decade as he saw the blues surpassed in the pubic consciousness by rock and roll. Bitter and angry at the demise of his musical career, he sometimes waved a pistol onstage. Such was his temper and erratic behavior that band members would rarely stick around for more than a few shows.

 

 

Search “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” at www.youtube.com, and more than 300 versions pop up. You’ll find recent performances by Bob Dylan, Jeff Beck and Imogen Heap, Imelda May, Cyndi Lauper, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Gov’t Mule, to name just a few, as well as older readings by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Johnny Winter, Cream, The Yardbirds, Captain Beefheart, Canned Heat, Bonnie Raitt, R.L. Burnside, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and many others. Over at www.archive.org you can hear 1920s renditions and an array of live covers by the Grateful Dead, Steve Kimock Band, Derek Trucks, and the North Mississippi Allstars – some recorded as recently as last month.

Seldom has one song connected so many musicians. With its mesmerizing riff, distinctive structure, and catchy melody, the song first appeared on 78s by some of the earliest bluesmen on record. Variations soon showed up in the repertoires of Mississippi-based Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. The song journeyed north to Chicago with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James. It crossed over into British blues and rock via covers by the Yardbirds and Cream. It was injected into mainstream American rock and roll by Johnny Winter, Canned Heat, and others. A century after its creation, the song still fills dance floors and provides an unsurpassed avenue for self-expression.

 

 

Even 14-year-olds get the blues.

Warwick guitarist Cory Bellucci is still in middle school, and it hasn’t even been three years since he picked up a guitar for the first time. But his electric take on blues and blues-rock has so far been making the right kind of noise on stages around Rhode Island, as well as with some of the state’s blues royalty.

Dave Howard, a family friend who has sung with Roomful of Blues, Young Neil and The Vipers and more, says that there’s a knack, a feeling for the blues, that you can’t teach someone. “And some people never get that. But I got the sense that he was born with it. He gets it on some kind of subliminal level that other people don’t get.”

On a recent Friday night at Nostalgia, in Warwick, Cory sat in with Gary Gramolini and his band, The Grinders, adding demonic bends and swoops and an impressive speed and clarity to a mix of blues ballads, burners and shuffles. The crowd, composed of family friends and regulars, went wild, and so did Cory, with an array of stage moves largely borrowed from his heroes but with an intensity that belied not only his age but his quiet nature.

Afterward, Gramolini said, “I’m privileged to have Cory sitting in with us. He’s a talented kid and we play well together.” He was introduced to Cory through Dave Howard, and when he saw the youngster play with Rhode Island blues-rock heroes Black and White, “he always brought the house down. I was impressed. He’s got a lot of skill.” He gave him about a half-dozen lessons, but it was more like a meeting of peers: “I turned him onto a few things and he turned me onto a few things.”

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

WITH THE likes of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Eminem scheduled to perform at last night's Grammy Awards wing-ding at Los Angeles' Staples Center, it's understandable that Mick Jagger's first live performance at the music industry's annual orgy of self-congratulation may not have meant much to younger fans. But for devotees of classic rhythm and blues, the scheduled turn by The Most Stoned Roller of Them All (as the late Daily News gossiptista Larry Fields would have written) and Raphael Saadiq was probably the show's highlight.

 

Jagger - who had never before performed live at a Grammys ceremony - and Saadiq were slated to pay tribute to Philadelphia native Solomon Burke, the acclaimed soul singer who died at age 70 in October of natural causes while sitting on a plane at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.

 

A contemporary of such R&B titans as Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, Burke, who grew up in West Philly, never reached those artists' commercial heights. Nonetheless, those in the know consider him as good as any soulster of his time.

 

"I remember when he came out with the song 'Cry to Me.' I knew then Solomon was a voice to be reckoned with," said "Sound of Philadelphia" songwriting icon Leon Huff.

 

"I always thought he was a powerful singer," continued Huff, who is working on an album to be called "Groovy People." "I always loved those baritone voices. And Solomon had one, and so did [the late] Teddy Pendergrass. They were the two most powerful baritones in Philadelphia R&B."

 

According to Kal Rudman, publisher of Cherry Hill-based Friday Morning Quarterback, which tracks music for the pop-music radio industry, Burke is "up there in the pantheon of all-time greats. You could put him in a class with Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and Wilson Pickett. He had a God-given voice."

 

Like so many soul singers, Burke developed his vocal chops singing gospel music. At age 7 he became a preacher.

 

"They gave me a fish box to stand on and a cape and two pieces of chicken - and I was preaching," he told the Philadelphia Weekly in a 2002 interview. "[I] gave my first sermon when I was 7, had a radio ministry when I was 12 on WHAT-AM" (then the city's trendsetting R&B and gospel station).

 

According to his entry in Wikipedia, Burke's move from sacred music to the pop realm began at the end of 1955, when, after entering a management deal with local promoter and DJ Kae Williams, he signed with Apollo Records.

 

 

Catfood Records announces an April 5 release date for Memphis Still Got Soul, the new CD from Blues Music Award winner Johnny Rawls, whose last album, Ace of Spades, won the BMA in 2010 as Soul Blues Album of the Year. The new album features 10 original songs, plus a testifyin’ take on “Blind, Crippled and Crazy,” a song best-known for the version recorded by Rawls’ musical mentor, O.V. Wright. 

 

Memphis Still Got Soul was produced by Johnny Rawls and Bob Trenchard and recorded at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, Texas; and at Soul Tree Recording in Helena, Montana. Most of the musicians on each of the sessions also played on both of Johnny’s last two albums. Included on the Texas sessions are several members of The Rays, a band Rawls discovered in 1999 and subsequently produced for his own Deep South Soul Records. The Rays continue to back Johnny Rawls for some of his tour dates. Special guest on those sessions was guitarist Johnny McGhee, former LA Motown studio musician (Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross) and guitarist for the group, LTD.

 

    

 

 Smokey Robinson, front man for the Miracles, the heart and soul of Motown Records, and amazingly prolific songwriter (thousands of songs, some claim): he is Elwood’s guest this week. His songs will be heard, as done by the Stones, the Beatles, the J. Geils Band…. Motown memories will be shared. Also: some Miracles, of course, early influence BB King, Carlos Santana, and Rufus Thomas. You will hear a taste of what Smokey is up to today. Plus: new music from up and coming guitar man, Shane Pruitt. And a chance for you to win a copy of the new record from England’s answer to Etta James. She is Adele. The CD is called 21.

 

 For a list of stations where you can find House of Blues Radio

 

RBA Publishing Inc is based in Reno, NV with a satellite office in Beverly Hills, Florida. We produce the annual Blues Festival Guide magazine (now in its 7th year), the top-ranking website: www.BluesFestivalGuide.com, and this weekly blues newsletter: The Blues Festival E-Guide with approximately 20,000 weekly subscribers. We look forward to your suggestions, critiques, questions, etc.

Reach the E-Guide editor, Gordon Bulcock, gordon@bluesfestivalguide.com

or contact our home office at 775-337-8626, eguide@bluesfestivalguide.com
 

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