Vasti Jackson – Bourbon Street Blues Live In Nashville

What excitement, energy, creativity, and musical experience could mean to you? Vasti Jackson! When Vasti performs, your audience will be electrified! A soulful world renown guitar player and vocalist, whose presence captures an audience the moment he takes the stage, he commands the house while deftly leading his band.
Grammy-nominee Vasti (pronounced Vast-Eye) Jackson is a consummate performer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer. From his early beginnings playing in juke joints in McComb, Mississippi, to his most recent release, “Live In Nashville” is a no holds barred, walking the razors edge, funky blues celebration that puts you slap dab in the middle of the juke joint. Recorded at Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar. Vasti and his band move non-stop from Blues to Soul to Funk to Jazz. He made each person feel as if he were performing for that one person and that one person only. Vasti’s talent has been enlarged by an amazing array of musical experiences over 30 years of his vibrant career.
Jackson’s latest studio release “No Borders to the Blues”, is a good sample of Vasti’s limitless energy and magnetism. It spotlights his talents as singer and musician, and his utterly thrilling guitar mastery. This CD also features guest music stars who blend in a perfectly finished production of his own: piano great Henry Butler, folk funk master Bobby Rush (on harmonica), and New Orleans bass legend guitarist George Porter, Jr.
Rooted in the Blues, Vasti Jackson recorded on B.B. King’s Grammy award winning Blues Summit in 1994. In the 1980s and early 1990s Vasti was musical director, and guitarist ZZ Hill, Johnnie Taylor, and blues ‘n’ boogie queen Katie Webster, and has opened for the blues great on many occasions. He also worked with gospel greats – including the Williams Brothers, the Jackson Southernaires, and Daryl Coley; with soul and blues artists Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Milton, Percy Sledge and Sam Myers; and with jazz artists Harry Connick, Jr.
, Wynton Marsalis, and Cassandra Wilson, just as well. Vasti has also played guitar on Malaco Records for Latimore, Denise LaSalle, Bobby Rush, and Johnnie Taylor.
An accomplished composer, Vasti Jackson composed two songs for Stop Breakin’ Down, a film on the life of Mississippi blues icon Robert Johnson. He penned “Casino in the Cottonfield” for the Robert Mugge music documentary, Last of the Mississippi Jukes, and wrote on the spot and performed his “Train Rolling Blues,” in the PBS docu-drama series The Blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese. He also wrote and performed “America, Proud and Strong” with the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra and a 1,000-voice choir, for the 2003 Mississippi ETV presentation, Mississippi, The Birthplace of America’s Music. Festivals and international tours have taken him to Japan, Germany, France, Greece, South Africa, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, Norway, Finland, England, Uruguay, Brazil and Portugal.
Vasti Jackson has been featured in Guitar Player Magazine, Living Blues, Nothing But the Blues, Juke Blues (England), Blues Revue, and many other publications. He has performed on Dan Akroyd’s House of Blues Radio Hour, the Starz Encore Network, WGN-TV in Chicago, and PBS. He has performed, written, produced, and recorded music for HBO, VH1, Mississippi Educational Television, the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), and radio and television programs in Australia, Uruguay, Finland, and Canada. Vasti co-produced Bobby Rush’s Hoochie Man, earning a Contemporary Blues Record of the Year Grammy Award nomination in 2002.
Vasti Jackson is professionalism at its best. He is a combination of talent, broad experience and versatility. His soulful and energetic performance will take your audience on a journey they will never forget.

Shawn kellerman – Blues without a home

Guitar wizard Shawn Kellerman is poised to join the inner circle of musicians who define modern blues. Traditional forms are reinterpreted – a not-so-subtle union of past and present delivered with ferocious authenticity.
Shawn’s 3rd CD Blues Without A Home” is now available on flamingcheese records. The CD features Lucky Peterson on B3 and clavinet, and contains several get original tunes including “Love Is Sweet” that Shawn wrote with the late blues guitarist Mel Brown. This CD has some amazing guitar on it and it sound like Kellerman does live.

Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band- Live at Klook’s Kleek

One of the most accomplished pieces of British R&B to actually get captured on record, with influences ranging from Memphis to Motown, and some excellent playing by a youthful Andy Summers.

Harvey Mandel – Righteous Games Guitars Play

Digitally remastered edition of 2 original albums on a single CD of these late 60’s albums from American rock/blues guitarist Harvey Mandel. He produced a series of fine solo albums before joining Canned Heat. He was also at one time tipped to join the Rolling Stones as replacement for Mick Taylor, but joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers instead.How can you play the guitar solo on a Rolling Stones’ song, (“Hot Stuff”, which was actually somewhat of a hit), and still draw a blank expression when your name is mentioned in the typical conversation on favorite guitarists?… Mandel has had both the advantages and and the disadvantages of persisting with his unique point of view on guitar: His output is mainly instrumental, and,(although bluesy),somewhat sophisticated, which has drawn a core of lifetime fans and imitators, but doesn’t contain enough rock cliches to capture the masses. So which are you? This contains two of the original recordings by rock’s least known great modernist, who predates Beck and Clapton, not in release dates of commercial recordings, but in truly finding that magic tone we now expect from our guitar heroes. Find out what the Stones, Canned Heat, John Mayall, The Ventures, Charlie Musselwhite, and many others already know.

Osaka Monaurail – Rumble & Struggle

One of the funkiest groups of the past decade — and a hell of a great little album, right down to the JBs-styled cover art! Osaka Monaurail have it going on all fronts — tight drums, economical bass, riffing guitars, and the kind of horn work that we haven’t heard since Fred Wesley stopped working with James Brown — always perfect, never hokey, and handled with a sense of space and soul that’s extremely rare for a group of younger musicians! The production is wonderful too — at a level that rivals our favorite from the 70s, and which shows that it isn’t just the Daptone and Soul Fire sound of New York that can get the feel of a “classic” funk record right. It’s hard to sum up the strength of this set in a few short sentences — but take our word for it when we tell you that this smoking little record can easily go head to head with some of the best of the People Records generation! Titles include “The Chase”, “Jam 1976”, “Changes I Wanna Make”, “Strange Buddha (Karate)”, and “Rumble N Struggle”

Mark May Band – Live in Texas

The Mark May Band has officially released its 4th cd, “In Texas Live” (Flyindog Records, 2009). The new cd is the band’s first live album and presents a compilation of live songs recorded during 2002-2009. The cd features Mark’s smooth vocals, along with the dynamic twin leads and dual electric harmony guitar work the band is known for. The Texas-based blues rock band’s new cd includes Mark’s original songs, classic blues, and even steps into the jam band territory on this outing with their versions of “Ohio” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”. The cd spotlights the current band members, Dan Cooper (bass), Paul Ramirez (guitar) and Clyde Dempsey (drums), in addition to former guitarists including Kirk McKim (Pat Travers Band), Kenny Cordray, and Matt Johnson.
This cd finally gives the people a taste of what the band’s live show is all about!

Black Merda – Black Merda

Usually linked in with the brief explosion of “black rock” bands that followed Jimi Hendrix in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Black Merda’s formula was a good bit more complicated than most, and their debut album blends elements of hard rock, blues, soul, folk, and embryonic funk with a tough and uncompromising political consciousness that makes the disc at once a product of its time and not quite like anything else around back in the day. The guitar work from Anthony Hawkins and Charles Hawkins is tough and organic, whether they’re stretching out on extended blues jams such as “Over and Over” and “Windsong” or cutting some hard R&B-accented rock on “Cynthy-Ruth” and “Prophet.” Bassist Vessee L. Veasy (who also contributes most of the lead vocals) and percussionist Tyrone Hite generate a lean but effective groove throughout as they jump from the streetwise soul of “Reality” to the acoustic meditation of “Think of Me.” But as good as the music is on this album (and despite bland production from someone named Swan, most of it is very good indeed), what really sets it apart is the dark vibe reflected in the minor-key tenor of the melodies and the bitter realities of the lyrics. Grinding poverty, racism, political and social inequality, the ongoing nightmare of Vietnam, the growing schism between youth culture and the establishment, and the absence of any easy answers to the dilemmas of a nation spinning out of control dominate songs such as “Reality,” “Ashamed,” and “That’s the Way It Goes,” and the grim but wholly appropriate fable of “I Don’t Want to Die” ends this album as if a lid were being slammed shut on a coffin. Black Merda anticipates the grim consciousness-raising session of Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which wouldn’t arrive in stores until a year after this album, and if it isn’t the stark masterpiece that Sly’s album was, it’s good enough that this group deserves to be regarded as much more than a footnote in the black music scene of the early ’70s.