Oregon Music News: Oregon’s all-genre music magazine since 2009

Galactic
Galactic
07/02/2017

Your Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival Sunday - What to look for

Who to see, who to discover, your Sunday guide

Day three of five! The 30th annual Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival kicks off at noon. Stop by and see us in our booth in the Louisiana Pavilion near the Front Porch Stage!

Who's new? What about your favorites? That's the essence of the festival. You saw our roundup earlier this week. Now let's tackle today. And who better to tell us about who's playing than the guy who booked the bands, Festival Artistic Director Peter Damman.

Galactic (Brewery Stage 9-10:15pm) will be headlining. They’ll come in with somebody. I think they’re gonna lean on the woman who’s been singing for the last few years, Erica Falls. Really great singer, I mean she’s good as any of the special guests they’ve brought along. Actually she’s a spectacular vocalist.

We have Sonny Landreth (First Tech Credit Blues Stage 8-9pm) that day. Pimps of Joytime (Brewery Stage 5-6pm). That’s fairly recent. I really like them. They're really funny. They've got incredibly good groove. They've figured out how to fuse roots music to hip hop and it's just really innovative and fun. It's not pretentious, it's just really cool modern blues and soul and funk all fused in a way that works. They used to be called Legally Blynd. If you ask any of the musicians in town who the act to see is, that’s the act. I’m not kidding. Blynd is four guys who have spent their lives touring with Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Frankie Beverly and Maze, and they're just incredible R&B musicians but most of them are also involved really heavily in gospel quartet music. So they're great singers and the guitar player, Jubu, he is considered the great r&b guitar player on the planet. Like Kingfish knew about him... and only from video clips and stuff but Jubu is kind of the guy. And he  is really a phenomenal guitar player. He’s sort of like if  Jimi Hendrix had just continued on as an r&b guy and never turned into a psychedelic dude, that would be Jubu. So anyway that’s definitely a set to catch.

Dexter Allen (Brewery Stage 3-4pm) is a blues guy from Mississippi. He’s been up here to Portland a couple of times. I actually did a gig with him at Jimmy Mak’s a year and a half or so ago. He’s great. Really good vocalist and guitar player. He was Bobby Rush’s guitar player for a few years back, about ten years ago.

Suns of the Soul Revivers (First Tech Blues Stage 2-3pm) are a gospel quartet from the Bay Area that my buddy Jim Pew kind of discovered and recorded. Trying to surface a little bit. They're pretty cool. And they might be the most dynamic gospel quartet that's out there right now. They're one of the few that's really carrying on that tradition. Because gospel quartet music is very demanding vocally and most of the quartets that have existed over the years are  people who have sung and performed together for decades. They have this fusion of sound that you don't really hear anywhere else. So i'm really looking forward to that.

Then we have the after hours with Galactic and The Pimps that should be a party.

Post a comment:

Your Name:

Your Email Address:

Comment:

2000 characters remaining

Captcha:

Comments

Web Design and Web Development by Buildable