Over the last 10 years EG Kight has had made quite a name for herself in the blues world. She’s been nominated for multiple BMA awards, had her songs recorded by Koko Taylor, released several CDs on her own label and has toured non-stop. “It’s Hot In Here” marks EG’s first release for M.C. Records.

“It’s Hot In Here” combines blues and americana music in her own unique southern style. Special guests include Greg Piccolo and Bob Margolin. Eleven of the 12 songs on “It's Hot In Here” were written or co-written by EG. A must for fans of Delbert McClinton and Marcia Ball.

Check out these great reviews!

“The album showcases Kight's astonishing textured voice and cagey songwriting”
The Sun Gazette

“It's Hot in  Here,"  features her blazing guitar work and fiery, resonant voice. “
Patriot-News

“EG Kight has hit a home-run with this excellent album.” The Planet Weekly

www.mc-records.com

www.egkight.com                                                 

The Best Damn Blues Sampler Ever Returns!!

Since its inception in 2000, NorthernBlues Music has released a steady stream of incredible blues CDs-virtually every NorthernBlues CD has received rave reviews from critics all over North America and Europe.

The Future of the Blues, Volume 3 tracks from the latest NorthernBlues artists (see track listing) as well as two unreleased tracks from Watermelon Slim, and one unreleased track from Doug Cox and Salil Bhatt.

The Future of the Blues, Volume 3 also comes in a beautiful digipak with quotes on every NorthemBlues artist. The Future of the Blues, Volume 3 is the perfect marketing tool-great music, low price.

 An incredible value- a $7.98 list price for some of the best blues in the industry.

Over 65 minutes of terrific blues. Artwork by a Man Called Wrycraft- The Future of the Blues comes in a beautiful digipak. The Future of the Blues, Volume 2, has scanned over 1,800 units.

Artist Listing

1. Watermelon Slim (3 tracks)

2. Homemade Jamz Blues Band

3. Moreland & Arbuckle

4. Samuel James

5. Paul Reddick

6. JW-Jones

7. Eddie Turner

8. Carlos del Junco

9. Mason Casey

10. Doug Cox & Salil Bhatt

11. The Twisters

12. Zac Harmon

13. Mem Shannon

Fred Litwin has built an independent Canadian blues label that has forced the uninitiated to sit up and take notice while reinforcing the importance of the blues to those who love the music most, ultimately giving the tiny Canadian label a home on the world's musical map for bringing overdue attention to the blues in all its configurations.

Eric Thorn, Blues Reviewer

"A former INTEL exec  falls into the music business as a fan and ends up creating one of the most forward facing blues labels on the planet. NorthernBlues preserves our art form by encouraging growth and experimentation not merely dusting off stale shuffles and cliched phrases. 21st Century blues is Fred Litwin. That's what initially attracted me to the label and keeps me coming back for more.

BEARDO, BluesWax Senior Contributing Editor

"Few record labels are as musically adventurous or diverse as NorthernBlues. Fred Litwin has developed and nurtured a cadre of musicians that break down barriers and stretch musical boundaries; he's helped me discover new ways to experience the blues.

Eric Steiner, Washington Blues Society

"NorthernBlues Music = Blues on the Razor's Edge!"

Dave Rubin, Senior Editor Guitar One

www.northernblues.com 


CLICK ON BUTTON TO HEAR WATERMELON SLIM'S "DUMPSTER BLUES"

The number one destination in the world for real radio & music industry education and networking.


The World United Radio/Membership Conference will be a premier radio and music industry networking event for radio and music industry professionals from around the globe. This event will focus the national and international radio, music industry and related press on the worldwide music market while providing a platform for musicians and artists to gain exposure and be heard by radio; most importantly attendees will be educated in the business interests of radio and the music industry.

Showcasing Artists will represent multiple genres including Roots Rock, Bluegrass, Folk, Country, Roots/Americana Country, Tejano/Latin, Reggae, Jazz, Blues, Roots Gospel, Zydeco/Cajun, World, Celtic, Western Swing, Cowboy Western, True Country, and more.



Presented by Roots Music Association & The US Entertainment Force, the 2008 Music Conference promises to deliver an event like no other on the planet! This event features 8 large outdoor stages with more than 100 showcasing artists, once in a lifetime performance, networking and educational opportunities for both radio and music industry professionals!

In addition, the Roots Music Association will present the Roots Music Awards on stage at the Embassy Suites/San Marcos Convention Center on Sunday from 6pm to 8pm. The Roots Music Awards are selected by the RMA membership, radio & music industry professionals. Awards will be presented onstage to Record Label of the year (Major & Indie), Radio Station of the year, Disk Jockey of the year, A&R Person of the year, Publishing Company of the year, Record Promotion Company of the year, Artist & Album of the year, Song Writer of the year and Publicity Company of the year that have supported the following list of musical formats from around the world. A total of 120 awards will be presented.

Events will take place in multiple venues including the Embassy Suites Hotel and the San Marcos Convention Center plus the adjoining 300+ acres of music festival fun. Vending and display booths for artists and music industry professionals are still available on a limited basis.

As always, event attendees can expect to meet with Radio Station Representatives from around the world, Film and Gaming Industry Executives, Music Publishing Directors, Music Supervisors for Film and TV, A&R Representatives, Entertainment Attorneys plus much more.

The 300 acre World United Music Festival portion of the event will be open to the public daily from 12pm to 1am with a very large number of music fans expected to attend over the 3 days. Festival Tickets are available on the World United Festival website!

The World United Radio/Music Industry Conference & Music Festival promises to deliver a green event like no other on the planet!

www.worldunitedmusicfestival.com

Effective immediately, Talkin’Blues Media Inc. is piloting a series of “Talkin’Blues video podcasts” which will be available – absolutely free of charge – through the iTunes Store and http://talkinblues.podbean.com . To subscribe to these podcasts, go to the iTunes store, click on video podcasts and search “Talkin’Blues podcasts” or go to http://www.talkinblues.com/ and select the “podcast” option.

“The goal of these podcasts is simple: to provide more blues/roots music content on the iTunes network. Each will consist of one or two songs, together with a short interview with the featured artist.  Each podcast will be a condensed, slightly simplified version of the Talkin’Blues television series. I am hoping to produce a number of episodes to monitor interest in the project, with decisions to continue based on the outcome”, says series producer, Mako Funasaka.

The first video podcast features Billy Boy Arnold performing “Squeeze Me Tight” from his latest Electro-Fi CD release, “Billy Boy sings Sonny Boy”.  This video also features Mel Brown, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, Bob Stroger and Billy Flynn. Several other podcasts have been completed and will be published every 3 – 5 weeks.  Future podcasts will include The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Ruthie Foster, Gary Clark Jr., Julian Fauth and Watermelon Slim – to name a few.

In addition to producing these video podcasts, Mako Funasaka and his wife, Patti recently spent a week in Notodden, Norway to document interviews, workshops and performances at the Notodden Blues Festival for the future European Blues Senter (Center). The European Blues Senter is scheduled to be built in Notodden, Norway over the next few years.

“It’s truly an honor to be working with Jostein Forsberg and everyone at the European Blues Senter in Norway on this project”, says Funasaka. “It’s a compliment that they would include our work in presenting the Blues to their audiences. To be able to get in on the ground floor with such an exciting project is a wonderful opportunity for us and we’re absolutely thrilled about it.”

For more information, please go to www.talkinblues.com or email Mako at makofunasaka@rogers.com


Talkin’ Blues Media Inc. has produced two television series for Bravo! Canada (“Talkin’Blues” and “Rhythm, Roots and Soul”) as well as DVDs on Mel Brown and Jack de Keyzer. The Mel Brown DVD won the 2006 Living Blues Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Award for the Best Blues DVD of the Year. Talkin’Blues Media’s videos have also been featured at the Blues Music Awards, the Maple Blues Awards and the Canadian National Jazz Awards.

Blues icon B.B. King found himself speechless during a tour of a new multimillion dollar museum dedicated to his career. Then, he finally broke his silence.

“They tell me that heaven is beautiful. If heaven is more beautiful than the way I feel then I’m ready to go tomorrow,” King said.

King was on hand last Thursday for the kickoff of four days of events including the grand opening of the museum this past weekend.

The 20,000-square-foot B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center was built in King’s hometown of Indianola. It was built around a cotton gin where King once worked. It features four phases of King’s life, from his years in the Mississippi Delta to the present.

The $15 million project was mostly paid for with private donations. The state of Mississippi put up about $2 million. Museum executive director Connie S. Gibbons said the local community raised $1.7 million. “There’s not many communities that can make that claim ... it leaves me speechless,” Gibbons said.

The museum includes a small theater, a meeting room and galleries containing artifacts tracking King’s career. King said he told organizers “to get anything out of my house that they wanted and they did. When I came home, it was sort of like Katrina had been through my house. I’m happy they found things that were useful.”

Of course, King’s legendary guitar “Lucille” was one of the most coveted items. King said he donated Lucille gladly because “my guitar is more popular than I am for a lot of people.”

King said the museum will serve as an educational tool as well as an outlet for blues musicians. Gibbons said the museum will partner with local schools and universities to educate young people about Blues and the Delta. King said as far as he is concerned that’s the most important thing. “It’s going to help a lot of people that’s hungry for knowledge as I have been,” said King, who says he has lamented that he didn’t go to college.

The activities also included the unveiling of two Blues Markers — one in the Berclair community where King was born and another on Church Street in Indianola where King performed as a young man.

AP) _ Hurricane Katrina chased bluesman Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown from his adopted home in New Orleans to his hometown here on the Texas Gulf Coast, where he died in exile. Now, another hurricane has disturbed his rest.

The 1982 Grammy Award winner's casket was one of dozens belched up by the ground when gulf and rain waters from Hurricane Ike flooded Hollywood Cemetery, an all-black burial ground on the west side of this city on the Sabine River.

Two days after Ike's landfall, water gurgled and bubbled ominously from submerged graves, and an invisible cloud of formaldehyde stung the eyes and throat. The only water left was filling now empty graves and vaults. 

Debris from the storm littered the ground, mingled with "graveware" trinkets left behind by mourners — a toy car, a plaster angel, a black doll lying on its back, its eyes staring blankly heavenward.

The top of Brown's vault had popped off, and his bronze casket had floated away. But three jars of Bama grape jelly remained by his aluminum marker, no doubt left by a fan of his instrumental classic "Grape Jelly."

Brown, who reportedly got his nickname from a teacher who said he had "a voice like a gate," was born in Vinton, La., but grew up here. He started out as a drummer but switched to guitar, developing a freewheeling blend of blues, swing, bebop, country, jazz and Cajun music that he called "American music, Texas style."

Indefatigable, he once joked, "I started off at 300 (gigs) a year, and then I backed off to 250." He won the Grammy for "Alright Again!", which was considered a comeback album.

The 81-year-old musician was living in the New Orleans suburb of Slidell when Hurricane Katrina inundated that city. Dying of lung cancer, he evacuated to Texas and never got back.

He died on Sept. 10, 2005, not two weeks after the storm.

Originally, the burial ground was called simply Community Cemetery. When reporters asked Sparrow's father why he changed the name, he replied that "everybody out here, just like in Hollywood, is star to their respective families and to their place in this community."

Sparrow said he had talked with city officials and had been assured they were working on restoring the historic graveyard.

"These are somebody's somebodies," he said. "And it needs to be taken care of as quickly as possible."

FROM: S.F. CHRONICLE


"I pimp-slapped a tiger and I dared him to cry. I went 12 rounds with a gorilla and gave him two black eyes. I want y'all to tell everybody that Little Junior is the baddest man alive,"

Earl "Little Junior" Crudup wailed in gruff tenor tones as he paced the stage at Redwood City's Little Fox nightclub.

A rhythm section made up of both professional and amateur blues players maintained a steady shuffle behind the little-known Oakland singer. Kenny Neal, a longtime attraction on the international blues circuit, supplied stinging guitar obbligatos between the vocal lines.

Born 50 years ago in Baton Rouge, La., and based in Palo Alto for past four, Neal had performed three numbers of his own, singing and playing both guitar and harmonica, earlier in the evening at the Redwood City Blues Jam. The free weekly Wednesday night event, "down the road a piece" from San Mateo, to lift to the title of an old boogie-woogie tune, has been attracting blues musicians and fans from throughout the Bay Area since its inception 2 1/2 years back.

Neal, perhaps the leading contemporary purveyor of the Louisiana "swamp blues" sound associated with such past greats as Slim Harpo, Lightnin' Slim and Raful Neal (Kenny's deceased father), often drops by the jam session when he's not on tour.

"I want 'em to know that I'm just a down-home boy," Neal said. "We're all in this game together, so I just like to get together to know everybody and share them nice moments onstage."

Crudup, 58, said he has hit almost every jam session in the Bay Area. "I think this is the mecca of Bay Area jam sessions because of the quality of musicians who come. This is my fourth time here, and they have always shown me a lot of love."

Vince Caminiti, a professional development specialist for a law firm by day and member of a band called Blue State, is the producer behind the weekly Redwood City Blues Jam. He is credited by most participating musicians with running the smoothest blues jam ever because of the way he puts together combinations of compatible players from the names on his signup sheet. Those whom Caminiti has failed to call to the stage - either because too many have signed up or he feels from past experience that their musicianship isn't up to par - might feel differently, though.

"I'm probably simultaneously loved and detested by 50 percent of the musicians," Caminiti, 58, said. "I have to be the bad guy sometimes, but if I walk out of a night and the audience thinks I'm a good guy, that was a good night."

Putting together five or six different sets of jammers, often mixing pros with non-pros or part-time musicians such as myself, always presents a challenge for the producer. "One week I'll have nine drummers signed up at 6 o'clock," he explained. "The next I'll have no drummers (other than the one in the host band) and 15 guitar players. It's like going to cook dinner and you don't know what your ingredients are until you already have the frying pan going."

"Most jam sessions are not run very well, and a lot of clubs that hold jam sessions are not very serious about it," said Daniel Castro, 53, a guitarist who often participates in the Wednesday night jam when he's not gigging with his own band. "Vince is a godsend to all of us because he runs it really right. You're not playing on barely a stage next to the bathroom. You have such a good venue with a nice stage and a nice sound system."

"It's a music room that has a bar," owner John Anagnostou, 51, said of the 240-capacity club. "It's not a bar that has music."

For the rest of the story:CLICK

CROWLEY, LA — New Orleans singer Irma Thomas will be the featured performer next Friday, Sept. 26, when Crowley’s Grand Opera House of the South re-opens after being closed since 1940.

Thomas, billed as Louisiana’s Queen of Soul, will perform a two-hour premier concert to mark the culmination of a multi-million dollar renovation and restoration of the city’s historical landmark at 505 North Parkerson.

The evening begins with a wine and cheese social hour at 6 p.m. followed by the 7:  p.m. concert.
.

Tickets are $50 and are reserved.

To purchase tickets, call 337-785-0440, visit the Opera House betweenn 8:30-11 a.m. daily, or visit the website at www.thegrandoperahouse.org

FIRST DOMESTIC RELEASE IN 5 YEARS


Composer and multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal, a two-time GRAMMY winner and one of the most influential American blues and roots artist of the past half-century, in his never-ending exploration of the complex origins and underpinnings of American music,  has forged a four-decade career by gathering and distilling countless musical traditions from a range of geographical and cultural sources: the Mississippi Delta, the Appalachian backwoods, the African continent, the Hawaiian islands, Europe, the Caribbean and so much more.

On September 30, 2008, he makes his Heads Up International debut with the worldwide release of Maestro.

The set opens with "Scratch My Back, " a song made famous by soul shouter Otis Redding in the 1960s. When Taj and his early band, the Rising Sons, opened for Redding at the Whiskey A-Go-Go in Los Angeles, the up and coming bluesman was immediately hooked by Redding's fiery stage presence. "There were very few artists who grabbed me the way Otis Redding did, " he says. "If anyone was an example of what I wanted to do with music, he certainly was it. His ability to take someone else's song and make it his own, and at the same time not lose the essence of the original song, was just fantastic." "Scratch My Back" is one of four tracks on Maestro to reunite Taj with his Phantom Blues Band, the combo that backed him on two GRAMMY winning recordings, Senor Blues in 1997 and Shoutin' in Key in 2000.

http://www.headsup.com/

October 16: Crystola Bar & Grill w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Woodland Park, CO October 18: Blues Masters at the Crossroads w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Salina, KS
October 19: Barfly w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Omaha, NE
October 20: Zoo Bar w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Lincoln, Nebraska
October 21: Cabooze w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Minneapolis,
October 22: Blues On Grand w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Des Moines, IA
October 25: Knuckleheads w/Kim Wilson & Magic Dick - Kansas City, MO
 

THE 36TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO BLUES FESTIVAL
September 26, 27, 28, 2008

This year at the 36th Annual San Francisco Blues Festival, the Delta Groove All-Star Blues Revue featuring The Mannish Boys, Elvin Bishop & Mike Zito will be joining the ranks of legendary acts such as Steve Miller, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Ike Turner, Little Richard, Keb Mo, Los Lobos, Buddy Guy, the North Mississippi Allstars, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Boz Scaggs, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Otis Rush, Luther Tucker, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Big Mama Thornton, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and so many others when they take the stage at this prestigious event. With this amazing Revue headlining the show on Saturday September 27th and a powerhouse set that is sure to rock the entire city, festival promoter, Tom Mazzolini can’t possibly realize the magnitude of the performance which is sure to make San Francisco festival history!!!

http://www.sfblues.com/