BluesTrotter.com

Chicago is home to many great festivals and events. One of its greatest is the Chicago Blues Festival, held in Grant Park each June. This year’s festival is a landmark celebration for the 25th Annual Chicago Blues Festival. The largest free admission Blues festival in the world, the four-day festival offers the best in national, international and local Blues entertainment on six stages with more than 70 performances, preceded by a month of Blues activities, known as Blues Season, throughout Chicago.

In commemoration of the 25th Annual event, the festival will not only feature a quarter of a century of the blues festival highlights but also celebrate the centennials of Louis Jordan, Tommy McLennan, and Blind John Davis. Throughout its history, the festival has presented countless number of blues notes and moments to millions of blues fans from around the world on Chicago’s popular lakefront park. Chicago Blues Festival honors and keeps alive an important part of the city’s heritage. The city’s first Blues festival in 1984 helped open the Chicago summer festival season and came a year after the death of Muddy Waters.

Through the years, the festival has celebrated many benchmarks and celebrated the men and women who lived their lives playing and singing the blues. Where else have blues fans been able to watch as Chuck Berry shared the stage with Keith Richards, did circle dances with Janie Hunter, or John Lee Hooker performed a “Boogie chillen’” solo for a crowd of hundreds.

The 25th Annual Blues Festival will deliver the same snapshot moments crowds have come to expect. Crowds will receive the royal treatment on Friday evening, June 6, with headliners Koko Taylor and her Blues Machine, Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater, and a special set honoring the past, featuring Ruby Andrews, Cicero Blake and Jackie Ross.

The Queen of the Blues, Koko Taylor, is no stranger to Chicago, which she calls home. Known for her rough and powerful vocals, Taylor has recorded for Chess Records, and most recently with Alligator Records. She has won more than 25 W.C. Handy awards and performs more than 100 concerts annually. Her talent has influenced powerful female musicians such as Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and Shemekia Copeland.

Eddy Clearwater is a versatile Chicago blues performer who has been nominated for and won several W.C. Handy awards. He is known for his stage performance as a showman, which includes his left-handed upside down guitar playing. On Friday evening, he will perform with the entire cast of his newly released CD, West Side Strut. The project features Billy Branch, Otis Clay, Jimmy Johnson, Lonnie Brooks, and band members of Ronnie Brooks (son of Lonnie Brooks), along with Eddy’s band mates. Chicago Blues Festival fans will be fortunate to see these greats playing together on one stage at the Petrillo Music Shell for one memorable night.

On Sunday evening, June 8, Chicago is in for a royal treatment with an appearance by Blues legend, B.B. King. The festival’s final night will be majestic with headliners that also include Little Willie Littlefield, Bobby Parker, and Karen Carroll with Charlie Love and special guest Lurrie Bell. Known as the King of Blues, B.B. King has graced the stages worldwide, and at age 82, he continues to tour as often as he did in his youth. King last played at the festival in 1988. With one of the most identifiable styles in the music business, King has influenced a myriad of talented musicians, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and George Harrison.

The Chicago Blues Festival has grown tremendously in its 25 years and now features more than one hundred performances on seven stages and extended hours of 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Chicago Blues Festival is known world-wide as one of the biggest and best Blues events on the planet, drawing hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to Grant Park, year after year.

Buddy Guy tickets have been available for more than 50 years now, and regardless of how much time passes, this musical legend still packs houses all over the world and still brings the house down regularly with his brand of soulful blues and foundational rock and roll. Guy’s life has been one filled with nearly as much struggle as success, and a look at his personal history will help explain why he’s become an iconic figure to millions of people around the world.

Early Life

George “Buddy” Guy was born on July 30, 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and he grew up in a poor environment. Rather than face a life of manual labor under the hot Louisiana sun, Guy learned the guitar as a child and played it religiously. His aspirations to become one of the world’s best musicians were met with resistance by those close to him, but he persevered and continued to hone his skills.

Guy bounced around “gin joints” in Louisiana as a young man, most often in Baton Rouge, but soon decided that he needed to move to a big city to really make his mark. That’s exactly what he did in 1957, when he moved to Chicago at the age of 21.

Career Beginnings

Upon arriving in Chicago, Guy fell under the influence of who many consider to be his predecessor on the Chicago blues scene, Muddy Waters. The following year, Guy won a local guitar competition that earned him his first record deal. However, his early career was difficult, as his style was not accepted by his labels. Guy was more of a free-wheeling guitar player who tended to improvise both in the studio and on the stage, but his managers demanded a more conservative, “by the book” approach to all of his work.

Guy tended to retreat to the stage for his artistic escape, as many of his early singles were not even released, and Buddy Guy tickets soon became a hot item in Chicago and in other venues around the United States. Basically, he made a name for himself more as a live performer than a recording artist, and eventually his reputation spread around the world, and led him to a series of shows in Europe.

Success and Influence

Guy’s presence and style was finally met with acceptance as his live shows continued to draw big crowds, and his talent influenced the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and the Rolling Stones, among others. Clapton in particular credits Guy as being his biggest influence and one of the greatest musicians he has ever seen.

Overall, Guy’s on-stage success ultimately followed him to the recording studio, and he has become a multiple award-winning recording artist. However, Guy is still all about his improvisational live performances, and Buddy Guy tickets will treat you to a guaranteed night of soul-stirring blues.

If you have a hankerin’ to be a blues guitar player but don’t know how to start, there is no better way than to immerse yourself in the recordings of the blues guitar players of the twentieth century. You can use the licks of famous blues guitarists as building blocks that will eventually be the fragments of your own blues guitar solos. There is wide agreement amongst blues fans about who are the greatest blues guitarists, who is the best to learn from, but once you get talking to people you will realize that each person’s reaction to the works of the blues masters is personal and unique. So your starting point to being a blues guitar player is to take your own personal take on the blues you hear and expand on it.

If you are a new guitar player you might not be familiar with the various techniques that blues guitar players use to make their guitars sing. There is no special blues “magic” that you learn from the blues legends, the guitar techniques for one style are pretty much the same as for another, but you will find your own personal way of making established guitar techniques your own.

There’s a whole world of communication in the techniques that guitar players use to play notes with the left hand instead of picking using the right hand. The techniques are called hammer-ons and pull-offs. A pull-off is the art of picking a note and taking your left hand finger away in a kind of pulling action so that the note below your original note sounds. For example, you could place you first finger on the first fret of the first string and the second finger on the second fret of the first string. With both fingers in place, you pick the first string sounding the F# note and pull your second finger away so that the F note at the first fret sounds.

The “opposite” to the pull-off is the hammer-on which, if you follow up on the pull-off you just executed, you “hammer” the second finger back to where it was at the second fret so that the F# note sounds again. Another technique for the guitar player’s left hand is String Bending. If you look at your finger placed at a fret, you move the finger by pushing up and down. This makes your guitar string give a warbling sound.

As you are an aspiring blues guitarist of the twenty-first century, you will probably prefer to listen to electric guitar players. B. B. King is the coolest of the black blues guitarists, closely followed by a white English boy named Eric Clapton. You could also give a listen to Chuck Berry who is practically a one-man guitar style.