{"id":96,"date":"2006-08-21T08:36:38","date_gmt":"2006-08-21T15:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montaraventures.com\/blog\/?p=96"},"modified":"2007-12-04T09:13:27","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T17:13:27","slug":"birthday-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/21\/birthday-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Birthday Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThis post is probably not what you’d expect from the title. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a blues triple-header at Villa Montalvo’s<\/a> Garden Theater. My spousal unit acquired the tickets for my birthday earlier this year for which I am very grateful. If you haven’t been to a show at Villa Montalvo, you should make the effort. It’s a beautiful spot. The Garden Theater seats around 1,000 people I’d estimate, not a bad seat in the house.
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\nThe afternoon started off with Leroy Bell and His Only Friends<\/a> playing a tight set. Hadn’t heard Leroy before and this was a nice introduction. He definitely has created a Windham Hill Jazz meets Dave Mathew’s band sound with a little blues influence thrown in for flavor. Of his set, the songs that stuck with me were “Voodoo” and “20 years from now.”
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\nLeroy Bell and His Only Friends
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\nThe second act is someone I’ve wanted to see, but never had the chance. Charlie Musselwhite<\/a>, the purported inspiration for Dan Ayckroyd’s<\/a> Elwood Blues<\/a> character in the Blues Brothers<\/a>. The highlight’s of his set were “Church is Out” (in other words, let the party start) and a Brazilian Blues tune. Listening to Charlie conjures memories of Howlin’ Wolf<\/a> and Sonny Boy Williamson<\/a>. Loved his aluminum harp repository, which stayed on stool beside him the entire performance.
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\nCharlie onstage (with harp case)
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\nThe first time I saw Etta James<\/a>, she was at least 300lbs of blues power. That was in 1991<\/a> at the San Francisco Blues Festival<\/a> at Fort Mason. I didn’t know too much about the blues, and it was her performance that prompted me to take a closer look at the genre. 15 years and 2,000 blues tracks later, I caught up with Etta again yesterday. She was about 1\/3 the size! Amazing.
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\nLosing that weight had no impact on the power of her voice, she’s still larger than life. She started off with “I just want to make love to you” – mind you, this is a nearly 70 year old woman doing bump and grind stage routines that make MTV hip\/hop videos look rated G. She was great. The highlights of the show for me were renditions of “At Last,” “Strung Out” (a Johnny “Guitar” Watson<\/a> tune,) and “I’d rather go blind.”
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\nEtta James
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\nIt was a great way to spend an afternoon and realize that getting older should be no impediment to doing whatever you love. Thanks Ellen.
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\nTechnorati Tags: Blues<\/a> | Villa Montalvo<\/a> | Etta James<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is probably not what you’d expect from the title. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a blues triple-header at Villa Montalvo’s Garden Theater. My spousal unit acquired the tickets for my birthday earlier this year for which I am very grateful. If you haven’t been to a show at Villa Montalvo, you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}