tonyballinger.com

I haven’t been out to hear live blues in some time. When Jim and I lived in Lakeview, we went out for blues a bit more often. Blues on Halsted had a promotion that if you brought in a bill or something proving you were from Lakeview, you paid a cheap cover on a certain night of the week.

Blues on Halsted has been my favorite place to see the blues, but I think Blue Chicago (the one at 736 Clark) has now taken the lead. If you get there early you can land optimal seating at one of their circular booths close to the stage. Another cool thing about Blue Chicago is that since there is two clubs within two blocks, one cover gets you into both clubs that evening. This evening Patricia Scott was singing with the Linsey Alexander Blues Band. They played a great set. Linsey played edgy blues guitar to Patricia’s spirited vocals.

Whenever I see the blues live, I always want to buy a CD to support the artists, but I rarely listen to blues at home. I have a few CDs by Robert Cray, John Lee Hooker and BB King – and that’s about all I need. Blues is a tough genre in that you can’t really deviate much from the traditional sound. While jazz can dabble with other forms, and rock is a wide open palette, with blues too much experimentation doesn’t sound like the blues anymore. The only example I can think of for “blues fusion” would be Moby’s album “Play”.

So for that reason, I enjoy seeing blues live, but probably am not going to have a large blues CD collection any time soon. But considering how easily we parked, and how relatively inexpensive an evening it was – I think I’ll be back to see the blues again real soon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.