The official site of the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival, and other blues education and performance programs offered by Centrum, the nonprofit center for the arts located at Fort Worden State Park, in Port Townsend, Washington.
(pictured: The Ebony Hillbllies, from Monday night at the 2011 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival)
Make plans now to attend the 2012 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival, taking place at Fort Worden State Park from July 29 through August 5, 2012.
Featuring master class instruction and workshops in country and acoustic blues, the 2012 festival also includes mainstage performances by festival artists at McCurdy Pavilion, as well as intimate club performances at venues throughout Port Townsend.
Stay tuned to the Centrum website throughout the year for updates, schedule information, and the announcement about the 2012 faculty lineup. In the meantime, save the date, and we'll look forward to seeing you in July at Centrum!
Tickets for the Down-Home Country BluesFest on Saturday, August 6, 1:30 PM are available only in person at the McCurdy Pavilion Box Office on Saturday beginning at 12:30 PM.
Club Passes
Saturday club passes (wristbands) are available at the McCurdy Pavilion Box Office on Saturday from 12:30 PM to 3:30 PM or at any club one hour prior to performance time.
For the 20th year in a row, Centrum is proud to present the “Down-Home Country BluesFest,” an eclectic gathering of traditional blues artists, in concert at McCurdy Pavilion on Saturday, August 6 beginning at 1:30 p.m.
Reserved Seating - $33/$24/$18; Patrons under 18 admitted FREE.
The 2011 lineup features a diverse mix of styles and performances, including guitar/piano prodigy Jerron Paxton, master storyteller and guitarist Guy Davis, and the trance-blues sound of guitarist Otis Taylor. The set also includes the legendary boogie-woogie pianist and Chicago master Erwin Helfer, West Virginia veteran bluesman Nat Reese, and singer/songwriter Pura Fé, slide guitarist and founding member of the internationally renowned a capella group, Ulali.
JERRON PAXTON
Los Angeles-based Jerron Paxton plays guitar, banjo, piano, harmonica, and washboard. While there are few young African American musicians learning country blues in the communities from which it arose, there is a definite increase in younger black musicians learning and playing blues in much the same way that young white people did forty years ago - by listening to recordings and personally experimenting on their instrument. Jerron Paxton is a supreme example of this, a young man from Watts with a huge repertoire of prewar blues and rags, and an uncanny ability to channel the spirit of pre-war guitar and piano blues music.
GUY DAVIS
Guy Davis is a musician, composer, actor, director, and writer, but most importantly, Guy Davis is a bluesman. Guy has dedicated himself to reviving the traditions of acoustic blues and bringing them to as many ears as possible through the material of the great blues masters, African American stories, and his own original songs, stories and performance pieces. Guy’s passion for this music is rooted in the stories and music of his family. It is his storytelling set in an acoustic blues framework that sets him apart from his contemporaries.
OTIS TAYLOR
With Otis Taylor, it's best to expect the unexpected. While his music, an amalgamation of roots styles in their rawest form, discusses heavyweight issues like murder, homelessness, tyranny, and injustice, his personal style is lighthearted. "I'm good at dark, but I'm not a particularly unhappy person," he says. After playing in several bands and on his own, Otis decided to leave music behind in 1976. After a long hiatus, Taylor returned to music in 1995. During the 2000s, Taylor has released a slew of well-received albums. Otis Taylor's sound is a unique and potent hybrid of Delta-inspired country-blues and traditional folk and mountain music. He is also a self-described practitioner of ‘trance blues’.
ERWIN HELFER
Erwin Helfer is a Chicago boogie woogie innovator and master, who has been forging his own piano music legacy. Born in 1936, Erwin has been playing and performing for over forty years. The sounds and personalities of past boogie woogie and blues pianists have nurtured Erwin's musical growth. His way of playing the piano is timeless with its power and impertinence of youth paired with the expertise and humorous wisdom of age, mellowed and ripened not in barrels but in blues joints, jazz clubs and concert halls in the States, Europe and Asia.
NAT REESE
Nathaniel H. ‘‘Nat’’ Reese was born March 4, 1924, in Salem, Virginia. When he was four, Reese’s family moved to Itmann, Wyoming County, where coal jobs were plentiful. In 1935, the family moved to Princeton where Reese heard a rich musical mix from big-name jazz musicians, local black musicians, and performers on such radio broadcasts as the Grand Ole Opry. He learned to play instruments, including guitar, piano, organ, bass, and string harp.
Reese worked in the coal mines after classes at Genoa High School. For two years, he played jazz and blues on Bill Farmer’s Saturday night show on radio station WHIS Bluefield. He attended Bluefield State College for two years, then left to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. During and after his college years, he was part of a dance band that played jazz, polkas, and blues throughout the southern coalfields.
His recordings include ‘‘Just a Dream’’ and ‘‘West Virginia Blues by the West Virginia Blues Man.’’ Among his honors are the 1988 John Henry Award and the 1995 Vandalia Award. He was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
PURA FE
Pura Fé plays acoustic lap slide guitar. Her soulful voice and acoustic lap steel carry the ancestral message of the ‘Indigenous World’ and the missing history that unified and separated the blood ties of Black and Indian people of the South. Pura Fé resurrects the Indigenous (Native American) influence on the birth of the Blues.
Pura Fé is a founding member of the internationally renowned a capella trio, Ulali, and is recognized for creating a new genre, bringing Native contemporary music to the forefront of the mainstream music industry.
Thanks to our friends at the Port Townsend Jefferson County Leader, the official program for the 2011 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival is viewable online.
However, a limited number of general admission tickets will be available on a first-come basis for $25 at the McCurdy Pavilion Box Office, on the campus of Fort Worden State Park, beginning at 10 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, August 3.
The box office will be open from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., or until the remaining tickets are sold. These special general admission tickets feature seating to the sides of the pavilion mainstage, and are ONLY available at the pavilion box office beginning Wednesday morning at 10 a.m.
Ann Rabson, who was scheduled to be on piano faculty for the 2011 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival, has had a recurrence of cancer, and therefore is taking some well-deserved time to heal and won't be joining us in Port Townsend. Our thoughts are with her.
In her place, the fantastic blues and boogie-woogie piano player Arthur Migliazza will teach intermediate and advanced piano to workshop participants. Arthur was born in Hyattsville, Maryland, and began taking classical piano lessons at age nine. He soon found himself under the tutelage of Festival alum Judy Luis-Watson, who introduced him to the soul in blues music. He began listening to blues piano greats such as Otis Spann, Champion Jack Dupree, Jimmy Yancey, Professor Longhair, Jay McShann, Katie Webster, and many more.
Inspired by his immense talent, blues piano luminaries such as Ann Rabson (from Saffire – the Uppity Blues Women), Mr. B, and the great New Orleans keyboard master Henry Butler have all taken Arthur under their collective wing.
In 2005, Arthur was awarded the Tucson Area Music Award for Best Keyboardistand in 2010 he was inducted into the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame. During the past several years, Arthur has been featured on the Cincinnati Blues Fest’s Arches Piano Stage multiple times, and has taught blues piano at Augusta Blues Week in Elkins, WV, and here at Centrum.
In 2009 Arthur released an album of songs with Blues Harmonica player Tom Walbank entitled "Burn Your Bridges. In January 2010 the duo were finalists at the International Blues Challenge held in Memphis, TN. 2010 also saw the release of an EP entitled "Clamdiggers", featuring Arthur on piano and keyboards, Mike Levy on bass and Alejandro Canelos on drums. Arthur currently resides in New York City.
2011 Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival faculty member Otis Taylor recently performed a 20 minute "Tiny Desk Concert" over at National Public Radio. He even talks about a previous visit to Port Townsend and working with the late John Jackson. Highly recommended viewing and listening...
Taj Mahal will join us midweek for a special concert at McCurdy Pavilion on August 3. In addition to the concert appearance, he will be a featured guest at a meet-and-greet, open exclusively to registered workshop participants, earlier in the day.
Composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Taj Mahal is one of the most prominent and influential figures in late 20th century blues and roots music. Though his career began more than four decades ago with American blues, he has broadened his artistic scope over the years to include music representing virtually every corner of the world. What ties it all together is his insatiable interest in musical discovery. Over the years, his passion and curiosity have led him around the world, and the resulting global perspective is reflected in his music.
There are musicians who travel a well-worn path, and there are musicians who create something new. We’ve asked the amazing Pura Fé to come to the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival in 2011 to teach lap slide guitar and vocals because she brings something unique and special to the blues.
Pura Fé is the founding member of the internationally renowned native woman’s a capella trio, ‘Ulali’, and is recognized for creating a new music genre, bringing Native contemporary music to the forefront of the “mainstream” music industry.
Her singing and lap steel guitar playing are spine-tingling. Her lap slide playing is very individual, she's invented her own style, based on backing herself up.
Curious about the linkages between the Native American experience and the Blues experience? Here’s Pura Fé in her own words on the subject:
"People forget Charley Patton was Choctaw, Scrapper Blackwell was Cherokee, all the early jazz and blues people were mixed; it was like another race that gave birth to this rich musical culture, a race that's largely been forgotten about. My people, the Tuscarora of North Carolina, were known for harboring runaway slaves — black, white and Indian. They were escorts on the Underground Railway and helped stir up the slave uprisings that happened around here, so the races have been mixing and influencing each other for a long time.
"The call-and-response thing in blues and gospel and its modulation is what Indians call Stomp Dance," Pura Fé explained. "The blues shuffle rhythm is a Round Dance, the heartbeat of Native music. Taj Mahal talked about this with me. I had been singing with Lee Gates, who is Albert Collins' cousin, and he pointed out how similar my wailing was to the sound of Lee's guitar. Taj said that the wailing guitar you hear in rock and blues is the sound of the powwow singers; nowhere in Africa do you hear that kind of guitar playing. It's obviously a Native expression."
Centrum's Artistic Director for Blues, Corey Harris, is launching a new project to honor the life and music of Malian singer, composer, and guitarist Ali Farka Toure (1939 - 2006). Corey is using a "crowdsourcing" model of fundraising to help make the project happen, and you can help by pledging a donation by March 9.
Corey writes:
"Presently, there is no comprehensive study of the man and his music. Ali Farka Toure made an indelible impression on the music of Africa and the world. He also had a profound impact on my personal outlook and my music. This project is a way to express my gratitude and share his accomplishments with those who may not have heard of him."
