This article by Richard Skelly was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on September 1, 1999. All rights reserved.
Throughout the late 1980s and '90s, every little city in America, it seems, has started its own blues or blues and jazz festival. Blues festivals were and are held in such unlikely places as Rockland, Maine, and Westport, Connecticut, as well as in Davenport, Iowa, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Even the Big Boulder Ski Resort hosts the Pocono Blues Festival every July. And then there's the granddaddy of them all, the Chicago Blues Festival, held every June in the Windy City's Grant Park.
Appropriately, the Great Adventure Theme Park in Jackson Township now has its own blues festival. Now in its second year, the Six Flags Great Adventure Blues, Brews and Barbecue Festival takes place this Saturday and Sunday, September 4 and 5, at the Northern Star Arena inside the park.
The lineup of performers includes some stellar guitar players, among them Son Seals and Jim Solberg. Solberg, whose band accompanied Luther Allison on all his U.S. concerts, hails from Madison, Wisconsin. He combines soulful vocals with fiery, venom-tipped guitar playing, and backed by a crack rhythm section, he and his band create some of the most powerful blues and blues-rock you will hear east of the Mississippi.
Son Seals, a longtime light on the Chicago blues club scene, is a gifted songwriter and guitarist who records for Alligator Records, but will enter the studio this month for the Cleveland-based Telarc Records. Seals and his band play straight-ahead Chicago blues and soul, and though they don't tour in the U.S. like they should, they do get over to the big European blues festivals a few times each year. Seals will be accompanied at the Great Adventure Blues Festival by Jimmy Vivino, a great blues guitarist and an integral part of the band on NBC-TV's "Late Night With Conan O'Brien Show." Although diabetes has slowed him down in recent years and even taken half his leg, Seals has lost none of the fire and passion in his guitar playing or singing.
Saturday's headliner, vocalist Tracy Nelson, also comes from Madison, Wisconsin, although she has been based in Nashville for the last few years. Nelson got started singing in the 1960s with Mother Earth, a Nashville-based band that released three country-rock flavored albums in the late 1960s and early '70s. Lately, though, her career has been resurrected with the release of "Sing It!" on Rounder Records, an album that combines her talent with the talent of two other great vocalists -- New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas and Austin-based keyboardist and singer Marcia Ball.
Harmonica player Rod Piazza, who performs with his band, the Mighty Flyers, on Sunday, specializes in the West Coast swing-styled harmonica, and his wife, Honey Alexander, adds keyboard treatments to the potent-but-smooth mix he and his band serve up. Piazza, raised in Riverside, California, learned his style of harmonica playing and singing by working with and befriending George "Harmonica" Smith, a West Coast musician, and the Chicago-based Little Walter Jacobs, who made frequent trips to California in the 1960s. Piazza's style combines the soul and gutsiness of the Chicago blues sound with the lighter, sweeter, mellower sounds of West Coast jazz-influenced blues. Piazza and his Mighty Flyers record for the New Orleans-based BlackTop Records.
Texas blues will be well-represented with Sunday's headliners, the guitar playing trio of Lonnie Brooks, Long John Hunter, and Phillip Walker. The singing and guitar playing group have a new album out on Alligator Records, "Lone Star Shootout," that showcases their influences. The three guitarists -- all now in their 50s and 60s -- also have a history, as they played together in clubs around Port Arthur, Houston, and other East Texas venues in the late 1950s and early '60s. Their new album, recorded in Austin in January, recalls their early days in the clubs around East Texas, where they would often get on the bandstand together and engage in "cuttin' contests," where each would try to outdo the other on guitar in a friendly competition.
Aside from the international touring blues acts on this year's Blues, Brews and BBQ Festival, there are a host of area bands performing on the festival's other two stages. They include Chuck Lambert of Red Bank, longtime Shore guitar legends Sonny Kenn and Billy Hector, Paul Whistler and the Wheels, the Maggi Hill Band, Bushnell Blues, Herd of Blues, Snapper Head, Terraplane Blues Band, Chuck Lambert, Lady Blue and the Tramps, Blues Keeper, Stringbean and the Stalkers, and the VooDudes.
With a food court offering Cajun food and barbecue, a beer garden offering brews from around the world, and the music stages serving up a potpourri of regional blues styles from around the U.S., it's hard to imagine the blues fans at this festival will be leaving the arena to sample any of those white-knuckle Great Adventure rides.
-- Richard J. Skelly