Forget winter. Think hot month, hot festival.
Booking is underway with two acts already on the 20th anniversary slate of the Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival.
Back this year, is the Vancouver band that added blistering vibes to an already torrid day at last year’s hot event.
The core members of the horn/percussion fuelled Five Alarm Funk have been together for seven years, Dameian Walsh adding his sax to the blend six years ago.
These talented, high-octane musicians create an orgy of fun on stage and their mad-hatter antics are infectious.
A couple of members are brothers, others went to school together and grew into this mad-cap band, says Walsh, the only one with a degree in music.
The music is original and has to appeal to everyone in the band.
“We have one rule – it’s gotta sound good,” said Walsh at last year’s festival, noting all 10 members of Five Alarm Funk compose.
“Ten review it and if one guy says it sucks, we don’t do it.”
While the band has fun together, the musicians are committed to what they do and how they sound.
“We may look like fools on stage, but we make a serious effort to do that,” he says, noting every move is carefully choreographed. “Ours is a musical, multi-sensical experience.”
Just as powerful but on the blues side, is award-winning American blues musician, artist and guitar maker James “Super Chikan” Johnson.
Born in Darling, Mississippi in 1951, Johnson spent his childhood moving from town to town in the Mississippi Delta and working on his family’s farms. He was very fond of the chickens on the farm, and before he was old enough to work in the fields, he would walk around talking to them. This led his friends to give him the nickname “Chikan Boy.”
Johnson got his first rudimentary musical instrument at an early age, a “diddley bow,” which was simply a piece of wood with a piece of baling wire stretched from end to end. As he grew up, he came up with new ways to improve and vary the sounds he could make with it, and finally, in 1964, at the age of 13, he bought his first guitar, an acoustic model that had only two strings.
As an adult, “Super Chikan” began driving trucks and tractors for a living. During the long stretches on the road or in the field, he began composing his own songs. When he showed some of the songs to his friends, they convinced him to go to a studio and record them.
Johnson has recorded several albums, his latest recorded live at Sirius/XM Satellite Radio’s state-of-the-art studio in Washington, DC, it features Chikan both solo and with his band, The Fighting Cocks.
For the second year in the row, Johnson was recently nominated for 2011 Blues Music Awards for BB King Entertainer of the Year, and Traditional Blues Male Artist of the Year.
A set number of earlybird tickets to this year’s 20th anniversary special are available until Feb. 24 – if they last. Get them at www.rootsandblues.ca, by calling 250-833-4096 or at 490 Fifth Ave. SW.
