The Chicago Blues Festival tour is celebrating 55 years of 12-bar goodness with another jaunt across Europe. This venerable institution was responsible for bringing over such legends as John Lee Hooker or Lowell Fulson back in the day, and it continues to introduce the Old Continent to the future of blues music.
The first ingredient in this year's vintage hails from Tampa, Florida: Selwyn Birchwood takes the blues in all of its forms (shuffle, jump blues, New Orleans-style funk, swing or boogie) and mashes it all up, producing a sound that is at once reverent to the form and completely of its time. As a player, his dexterity is impressive but even when he plays fast (and he often does!) the flurry of notes is never ostentatious: it's all designed to make you groove and dance but also, as he puts it euphemistically... move some furniture. You know what we're talking about.
Because more blues is always a good thing, Birchwood and the band were joined mid-set by Carley Harvey, a rhythm n' blues singer from Washington D.C. whose voice shifts effortlessly between a seductive croon and a torch-song belting powerhouse, often in the same song.
The blues can adapt, it can progress, it can transform, it can mutate, but as long as there are performers like Harvey and Birchwood who bring this ancient form to new generations and international audiences, the blues can never die.
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