News

Alana Bridgewater will co-host the Toronto segment of the (virtual) Maple Blues Awards along with Johnny Max

Introducing the Calgary Bluesfest Channel: The Calgary Bluesfest folks have launched their new Calgary Bluesfest Channel on Public Place Network! They will be offering live streams of their events and a library of blues videos from their festivals. The Calgary Bluesfest Channel offers hours of viewing and listening joy! Subscribe for an entire year for $60 ($5/mo.) or select as many songs as you like and create your own Bluesfest in your own home!. More info at www.calgarybluesfest.com

Gussow and Kawashima will virtually get together on Saturday, November 14th at 5pm EST to discuss the blues for the new millennium around the newly published book.

Toronto Blues Society continues to celebrate 25 years of Rez Blues, highlighting the best Indigenous Blues talent Canada has to offer. The Pioneer Profile Series returns with longtime Rez Blues producer Elaine Bomberry, in conversation with TBS co-founder Derek Andrews.

We’ve compiled a list of mental health resources for musicians and artists in Canada.

Toronto Blues Society presents Corona Blues: A Mental Health and Wellness Workshop on Monday, October 19 between 7pm-8:30pm! The free online event will cover a variety of strategies to help musicians, industry professionals, and music supporters to help manage their mental health during the time of COVID-19.

Stratford festival, Star Trek and now Smokestack Lightnin’.  Is there nothing William Shatner will not try? With an all-star cast of guitarists including Albert Lee, Brad Paisley, Steve Cropper, Ritchie Blackmore, Sonny Landreth, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Pat Travers, the shame-free Montreal-born thespian butchers blues standards with gusto and cartoonish hysteria. There are some places one needn’t boldly go, and this album is one of them.

The best news I heard all month was that singer-harpist Charlie Musselwhite, singer-songwriter Alvin Youngblood Hart, Squirrel Nut Zipper founder Jimbo Mathus, and drummer Cody Dickinson and guitarist Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars and their late father Jim Dickinson had made a record together in 2007. The second best news was that the album is finally seeing the light of day, on the Alberta roots label Stony Plain. The third best news that it’s called Volume 1. More to come, then.

I’d like to say the Edmontonian Bill Bourne sounds like he has a hell hound on his trail, but he deserves better than a blues cliché. Still, he sounds like he has a hell hound on his trail.
Released in September, A Love Fandango has a lovely autumnal feel, like a soundtrack to a wheat-field film starring Lucinda Williams. Bourne plays banjo, dulcimer and four or five varieties of guitar – I lost count. You don’t need me to tell you that he’s accomplished on all those stringed things. He could probably play a bean if he had to.

Danny Brooks opens up his new record the same way Jack de Keyzer does, with a song called Are You Ready. Brooks’ doesn’t end in a question mark. Must be rhetorical. With road gravel in his epiglottis and promise in his heart, Brooks sings “Are you ready to have a good time of-down home Southern soul?” Sure, why not.
As the album title indicates, the tracks – 20 of them in all – were recorded in Mississippi, outside Jackson. Brooks and Lil Miss Debi (no relation to Miss Emily) identify as Texanadians. One imagines that gets them into all sorts of trouble when they have have to deal with immigration officials at the border.