North Jersey Blues Society

Hot Tuna and Friends Concert Review of 10/29/2025 Show at The Bardavon

Neal Pattman (1926-2005) was an undervalued, one-armed harmonicat. His rustic sound pledged allegiance to the unamplified, country-blues style rampant around the rolling hills of the Southeast’s Piedmont region. Stylistically, think: Sonny Terry, a fellow Georgian whose harp was also an extension of his lungs.

Isn’t DNA quite the prankster?

Buddy Guy’s latest fireball goes by the name of Ain’t Done With the Blues. The truth in its title becomes blatantly obvious within seconds and keeps on resounding throughout the remaining 65 minutes. But that should be of no surprise, coming from the reigning master of electrified blues. Even at 89, the Louisiana-born Chicagoan shows zero sign of letting up, still rattling walls and shaking the earth with his telltale brand of intensity.

If you build it, they will come. And that they have—in droves. The Last Real Texas Blues Album is a testament to the magnetic pull of Antone’s, the hotspot of Lone Star hotspots.

NJBS Showcase Series Recap: Different Shades of Blue at Factory Records

Sonny Landreth and Cindy Cashdollar Concert Review

Blues and Art Unite at Ringwood Manor: On Saturday, the Uptown Boogie Band thrilled audiences at the Ringwood Manor Art Gallery during the 57th Annual Fall Exhibition (Aug 29–Oct 3). In partnership with NJBS, the evening blended soulful live blues with a stunning art exhibit in the gallery’s warm, wood-lined space.

For a handful of fruitful years during the 1970s, the two of them had quite the win-win scenario working: Jimmy Witherspoon—the consummate vocalist whose baritone started work back when jump blues was in its heyday—needed a fretsman to soup up his touring band; Robben Ford—the young lion whose guitar, having come under the spell of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, spoke the era’s longhaired dialect of blues plus straight blues—was in need of a high-profile band.

Well, well, well—as R.L. would boom in his grinning Mississippi drawl. Released simultaneously, Garry Burnside’s It’s My Time Now and Kent Burnside’s Hill Country Blood just opened both barrels for a double blast of north Mississippi blues.

You are at 305 Issaquena Avenue, right off 3rd Street. Ten minutes around the corner lies Red’s Lounge, where folks have been juking since the turn of the 1980s. But where you’re standing serves as a perfectly solid, makeshift juke that, at the moment, is erupting with blues. Because wailing before you—inside Clarksdale Reels, a recording studio moonlighting as a blues club in off-hours—is hometown hero Anthony “Big A” Sherrod fronting a three-piece band. Welcome to Clarksda

From Charley to Buddy to Minnie and out to Jimi: Oh, what a day meant for zooming. Rory Block’s newest batch of (largely) one-woman performances comes without a title track. Heavy On the Blues instead functions as a tipoff alerting you as to what awaits.

Serendipity tracked him down to a bustling barroom stage all the way over in Groesbeek, Netherlands. It was late-October 2018, and James “Icepick” Harman was at one of the whistle stops along his annual European tour, letting an appreciative Dutch audience hear for themselves why a harmonica with the blues is a thing of wailing wonder.

Darn that Ronnie Wood! Harvey Mandel was that close to getting the nod to join “the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band.” But on second thought, Wood’s better fortune with the Rolling Stones served as the hand of fate that kept Mandel’s bold fretboard explorations from being detoured or corrupted. Because, in the 57 years since debuting in 1968 with Cristo Redentor, Mandel has kept stretching the bounds of what a guitar can sound like as well as what its strings can do.

Honest—this album is the work of only 10 flying fingers. Not 20.

In Bentonia, Mississippi, geography is destiny for guitar men. Heaped on top of that fate is abundant audible proof that life is even far less of a picnic in that small Delta town (Pop. 274, in 2023). But such a perfect storm makes for a profoundly surreal experience. Bentonia, in fact, is home to the bluest, badluckest blues around. They don’t come any bluer.

What if? The blues has as many such hypotheticals as John Lee Hooker has actual records (official plus bootleg). For starters: What if Robert Johnson had plugged in?

More than 20 professional musicians were present for this tribute to the late, great Joe Louis Walker.

It didn’t have to come to this. The divine magic needn’t have ended so tragically. Or, most certainly, so soon. She was only 48.

NO BEER RUN REQUIRED. Dressed comes with more than enough of its own intoxicating spirit and boozy wobble. Because these nine men are hellbent on rekindling the glorious cacophony of New Orleans brass bands: the keg party of Louisianan music.