North Jersey Blues Society

Bobby Rush—the Chitlin’ Circuit’s most revered gladiator with 10,000plus worldwide shows and still very much counting—adds a new offering atop his mountain of 400plus credited records. Guitar ace Kenny Wayne Shepherd—whose high-powered goods have hit the road with Buddy Guy to Van Halen and the Rolling Stones to the 2025 Experience Hendrix traveling circus—also has a new record out. Both albums are one and the same: Young Fashioned Ways.

The key is not to do anything understated. Slight, nuanced and restrained have no place here either. After all, Mack Orr has long reigned as king of Memphis bruiser blues, the kind that clobbers on a few different fronts. In blunt terms, “Daddy Mack” is brute force incarnate.

“An Answer for Isaac” unleashed its full power inside a wind tunnel fit for jet turbines. Or so it sounds.

Have you ever heard Chicago bluesman Jim Brewer? Or perhaps let’s back up and start at: Have you ever heard of Chicago bluesman Jim Brewer? Granted: It’s not exactly a fair question given that Jim remained one of the city’s great insider secrets, hiding in plain sight outside at the Maxwell Street Market as well as inside the No Exit coffeehouse for decades on end.

Typically, these conditions would clearly come under the purview of blues: hearts sunken, busted, and torn by grieving loss. Not tonight, though. Definitely not tonight.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nirvana, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Elvis Presley, White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty. Oh, and don’t forget Ram Jam: They all can’t be wrong in that a Lead Belly song—be it “Cotton Fields” or “Midnight Special” or “In the Pines” or on and on—is simply too hard to pass up. The temptation to translate him for rock ears is just too great.

Something is about to hit. You can sense the magnitude, its impending force. So much so that the air tensely vibrates, audibly buzzing. And then …

Into the gutbucket we go.

Little Brother Montgomery could sniff out a piano. Any place. Any time.

The music scene is buzzing with excitement, and all eyes are on the latest album from The Bob Lanza Blues Band, titled Breadman's Blues.

Long, long, long before electricity, there was the groove. And blues came even before that. Héritage puts such prehistory back into play.

By its inherent—and infamous—nature, the location encases any recordings that make it out of its clutch within an aura: The sound haunts.

Eliza Neal's latest album, Colorcrimes, is a continuation of her exploration of important social themes and personal growth.

Welcome to murderers’ row. For the next 40some minutes, gritty, old Chicago sends up one killer track after the next—as heard in the 1950s.

Live, BLUES People command the room: a wall of sound pushing out from the stage. Now, that same experience punches out from The Skin I'm In.

Remember the iconic ad for Maxwell audio cassettes back at the turn of the 1980s? Similar blowback effect with Revelation.

A saxophone—correction, the saxophone of its era—instantly blazes out of the box with no introduction, no windup, no warning.

The mystique of a Blue Moon Marquee record lies as much in the atmosphere generated as in the music itself.

Who needs electricity anyway? Or, for that matter, a band? After all, Robert Johnson rose to the status of godhead without either stuff.

Oh, what a night. It is 1977. B.B. King sports a three-piece suit and a seven-piece band. He is In France. And he is “on.”