Bay Space competition has its largest day ever in 40-plus-year historical past

Fountain Blues & Brews Competition is in progress mode.

The longtime blues music gathering doubled in dimension, going from a single-day affair to a two-day fandango, in its forty second 12 months.

And what was the response from blues lovers throughout the Bay Space?

The competition ended up drawing its largest crowd ever — pushing towards 3,000 individuals at Plaza de Cesar Chavez in downtown San Jose — on Saturday (June 14), in accordance with Fountain Blues Basis Board Member Dan Orloff.

The principle attraction was younger blues celebrity Christone “Kingfish” Ingram — who’s just about the most well liked title within the style — topping a Day 1 invoice that additionally included such main abilities as Sacramento’s Kyle Rowland Band, Fresno fret grasp AC Myles and guitar nice Child Andersen’s Greaseland All Stars.

The Day 2 invoice — an enormous Father’s Day finale set for Sunday — additionally wasn’t brief on expertise, with legendary New Jersey bluesman Walter Trout set to take the stage following units by Vanessa Collier and Laura Chavez, Aki Kumar’s Bollywood Blues Band, Alabama Mike and The Revelators and others.

Tickets are nonetheless out there for the Sunday present. Go to fountainblues.com for particulars.

The large-name headliner, the record-setting turnout and the top-to-bottom wonderful musicianship on show positively made for a triumphant Day 1 for the Bay Space’s longest-running blues competition, which obtained its begin as a student-run occasion at San Jose State College in 1981 and moved to its current house at Plaza de Cesar Chavez in 2015.

Some have linked the leap in ticket gross sales to the field workplace success of Oakland director Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.” Because of the the music in that movie, individuals who haven’t talked concerning the blues in years — if, certainly, ever — are actually buzzing concerning the style. In that sense, this lasting legacy of this actually good horror film could properly show to be the shot-in-the-arm given to the blues.

After all, the correlation between the success of the movie and the competition was strengthened by the presence of Kingfish on the invoice. The younger vocalist-guitarist, who completely blew me away after I first noticed him carry out on the 2023 BottleRock Napa Valley competition, is featured in “Sinners.”

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram takes his present into the viewers throughout the Fountain Blues & Brews Competition at Plaza de Cesar Chavez in San Jose on Saturday, June 14 (Jim Harrington, Bay Space Information Group). 

Regardless of the presence of a authentic blues celebrity on the invoice, the competition nonetheless had loads of its common mellow, low-key appeal, as individuals sat on blankets and seashore chairs and chatted with one another between bites of barbecue and burritos. An enormous portion of the general Bay Space blues group seems to this occasion, so you possibly can hear devotees catching up about upcoming gigs and making future plans. I walked round a bit with vocalist-guitarist J.C. Smith (who’s just about the Mayor of the San Jose Blues Scene) and he will need to have been stopped by followers/buddies — for hugs, handshakes and hellos — at the least a dozen instances throughout a 20-minute interval.

The music occurred on two phases, with the units bumping up towards one another in order that you would mainly rock to the blues nonstop from the time the primary guitar was strummed at just a little after 11 a.m. to when the headliner completed up at round 8 p.m.

Two of the perfect units I noticed on Saturday occurred on the secondary Poor Home Bistro Stage, the place Sacramento harmonica nice Kyle Rowland led his band in a enjoyable set of blues after which Fresno’s AC Myles confirmed why he’s one of many Central Valley’s biggest items to the style.

I additionally actually loved the energetic providing from Child Andersen’s Greaseland All Stars on the massive Essential Stage, particularly as soon as the legendary Fillmore Slim — aka, “The West Coast Godfather of the Game” — joined the occasion. Slim, now 90, can nonetheless rock a crowd like no one’s enterprise.

The competition hit its zenith, as anticipated, as soon as Kingfish and his terrific band hit the Essential Stage. The Grammy winner, who received the perfect modern blues album trophy with 2021’s “662” (named after the world code of his native Clarksdale, Mississippi native), lived as much as all of the advance hype as he delivered a crowd-pleasing 90-minute set.

His guitar work is totally incendiary — and he’d give followers an opportunity to expertise his fret work in an up-close-and-personal method later within the set as he left the stage and walked proper out into the viewers. And he soloed all the best way, by no means as soon as breaking his musical stride as he labored his method into the guts of the gang and burned by means of notice after notice whereas tons of of cell telephones caught all of the motion.

That’s the form of expertise that music lovers will nonetheless be speaking about for days to come back. And it’s but yet one more signal why the Bay Space’s longest-running blues competition could properly nonetheless have its finest days forward of it.