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Harry Manx and Kevin Breit reunite for a rare duo performance at
The Maple Blues Awards gala at
The Mod Club, Monday January 15, doors at 7pm, show time 8:30.
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Diana Braithwaite, Chris Whiteley, Shakura S’Aida and John Campbelljohn
are just a few of the
showcasing artists at Blues Summit III. Join us for a weekend of receptions,
networking, educational and informative seminars
and showcases culminating with the Maple Blues Awards Gala at the Mod Club, 722
College St. on Monday, January 15, 2007.
Keynote Speaker: Elijah Wald
Elijah Wald is the keynote speaker for this year's Blues Summit. He has been a musician since age seven, and a writer since the early 1980s. He has written more than a thousand articles, mostly about folk, roots and international music for various magazines and newspapers, including over ten years as "world music" writer for the Boston Globe. In the current millennium, he has been devoting most of his time to book projects, producing a half-dozen books on subjects ranging from Mexican drug ballads to hitchhiking.
He has toured as a guitarist and singer, spending the late 1970s and most of the '80s wandering around Europe, Asia, Africa and Central America, fronting a blues band in Seville, a swing duo in Antwerp, and a rock band at the Grand Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka and recorded a couple of albums, Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker and Street Corner Cowboys.
He hung out in Greenwich Village where he met Dave Van Ronk, "my mentor and main influence, who gave me a year of guitar lessons, and many years of staying up late at night, listening to records of everything from Bulgarian folk music to Bing Crosby. Dave was a brilliant and omnivorous intellect, and I did his best to capture his voice and a sample of his memories, wit and wisdom in his memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
Along with Dave, he picked up stuff from various other musicians over the years, as well as learning a lot from records. (Rev. Gary Davis and Joseph Spence are my longtime guitar heroes, and he recently completed an instructional DVD on Spence's style.) The most interesting experience of this kind was three months in Lubumbashi studying with the Congolese master Jean-Bosco Mwenda. He plays one of Bosco's tunes on Street Corner Cowboys, but to really get a feel for his music, he recommends the albums on his African acoustic guitar page, as well as African Acoustic, an album he did with Dominic Kakolobango. He also learned a great deal from Perry Lederman, whose posthumous CD is one of his treasures."
As a writer, he has published several books and articles for various magazines and was "world music" critic for The Boston Globe for many years. Currently he is teaching blues history at UCLA and working on an alternative history of American popular music and performing whenever possible as a guitarist and singer. He has won numerous awards, including a 2002 Grammy for the liner notes to the Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, the 2001 Best Performing Arts Book award from the Independent Publishers association for Josh White: Society Blues, Best Arts Book at the 2002 Latino Book Awards and an award from the Southwestern Library Association for Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, an honorable mention for the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for Escaping the Delta, and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
For showcase and conference schedules and
lots more information, please see the
Summit website.
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