Blues Alive 2024 will bring Blues Music Awards and Grammy winners

The twenty-eighth edition of the festival will take place from November 14th to 16th. In total, the program will feature over thirty performers on three stages and a variety of other events throughout the city – jam sessions, film screenings, masterclasses, and lectures. We are very excited about the first names announced this year. Once again, there are several Grammy Award winners or multiple Blues Music Award winners, so visitors can look forward to a first class musical experience – not just pure blues, but crossing genres into alternative country, rock or rockabilly.

Grammy Award winner Cedric Burnside is the grandson of one of the greatest hill country blues legends, R.L. Burnside. Although primarily a drummer, he also plays guitar, sings and writes songs. He is also the protagonist of a number of outstanding albums. He ranks among the most original creators of the middle generation of American bluesmen.

Eric Bibb first performed at Blues Alive in 2012 in an “African” project with Malian guitarist Habib Koite, then five years later he performed solo and now he is back again after seven years. Fingers crossed that this year’s Grammy nomination, his third in a row, works out this time with his wonderful latest album Ridin’.

In his solo projects, Albert Castiglia has embraced both the classic Chicago electric blues approach and the modern blues-rock expression. His album Masterpiece earned him a Blues Music Award in the Best Bluesrock Album of 2020 category, and he even took home two prizes from the most recent Blues Music Awards so far in 2023, again for Bluesrock Album of the Year, and was also named Bluesrock Artist of the Year.

Notable American singer-songwriter and rock singer Chuck Prophet rose to fame in the 1980s with Green On Red, a popular band that spanned the genres of psychedelia and alternative country. He has a distinctive songwriting style and is a very active composer whose songs have been sung by dozens of singers, including such stars as Bruce Springsteen and Solomon Burke.

Other newly confirmed names include American singer and guitarist Duwayne Burnside, one of the fourteen children of hill country blues legend R. L. Burnside, as well as the duo Hugo Race and Michelangelo Russo, who will release a new album this year called The Crucible, the exceptional Italian lap steel guitarist Marco Bartoccioni, who will present an explosive show at the border of blues, southern rock and soul, and the American guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Luke Winslow King, who mixes delta blues with elements of folk, gospel and jazz. In Šumperk he will be joined by the phenomenal Tuscan resophonic slide guitar player Roberto Luti. Also added to the festival’s programme is the Scottish player of the same instrument, Dave Arcari, who will bring wild delta blues mixed with punk, trash country and rockabilly, and the band Three for Silver with frontman Lucas Warford, whose voice is not unlike Tom Waits, spreading fun and music without boundaries.

As has become a tradition, the November Blues Alive program will also feature the winners of the Blues Aperitiv competition for emerging blues artists. The deadline for entries for this year’s Blues Aperitiv is March 1. From all the entries, the jury will select seven winners who will play at the final evening on 13 April at the House of Culture in Šumperk.

Categorised in: Nezařazené

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