JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: Sacramento Bee Date: 08/2009 Writer: Jim Carnes

A white guy from Maine might not be the first person you'd think of as a bluesman. But Jason Ricci, born in Portland 34 years ago, says you should think again.

Maine, he says, is "a very bluesy place. From October, when we get our first snow, until June, it's gray and miserable and dark. The snow doesn't melt, and sun doesn't shine and there's nothing to do.

"It's a perfect atmosphere for the blues."

Ricci, who will play in Sacramento twice in the next five days, now lives in Nashville – probably not your choice for a bluesman's home, either.

The singer and harmonica player and his band, New Blood, will perform at 9 tonight at the Torch Club. On Tuesday, Ricci will lead a harmonica blowout at the same club, presenting nine harp players in town for this year's harmonica convention. New Blood will be the house band for the show.

"The Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica has a humongous harmonica convention that takes place every year," Ricci says in a telephone interview from his home. "I take advantage of the fact that you have 500 musicians from all over the world, really, and book some of the best for a blowout in whatever town the convention's in."

The show, Ricci says, "is not necessarily a blues event because you have such a variety of performers with a wide array of approaches" (to the harmonica).

Ricci's band shows are not strictly blues events, either, although they are "events." His music fuses blues, rock, funk, Eastern rhythms and jazz in a surprisingly cohesive "jam band" set. Comparisons to 1990s-era Phish and Grateful Dead extended sonic excursions have been made.

"I more or less become infused with supernatural powers during the shows," Ricci says of his incandescent performances.

"It's sort of like possession. I'm definitely in the passenger seat, and there are other forces at work. The making of music can be very close to the loss of ego – of self. Athletes and artists talk about it, about losing oneself in the event."

Ricci has been interested in music – the blues in particular in the beginning – since he was 14. "I was lucky enough to have a mom who was cool enough to take me to a lot of shows," he says. At 21, he won the Sonny Boy (Williamson) Blues Society contest. In 1999, he won the Mars National Harmonica contest, and in 2005, he was awarded the Muddy Waters Most Promising New Blues Artist award. He has played with such blues greats as Susan Tedeschi, Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, and spent 15 months with Big Al and the Heavyweights, an unconventional, New Orleans-based music outfit, before forming his own band in 2002.

"I got tired of bands breaking up, or being fired and finding myself out of work in some town I didn't know," he says. "All I really wanted to do was play harmonica. Initially, I wasn't very interested in singing, but I've always enjoyed songwriting, so my own band seemed the most secure place to pursue my music."

He's spent years, he says, immersing himself in music from Sun Ra to Little Walter, from the Rolling Stones to Lou Reed. "I'm a very obsessive personality. I may be into a number of music genres, but I'm always discovering and studying – devouring – some subject.

"I don't like to dabble."

His eclectic interests and those of his band members – "I have a band that is also into all sorts of things; they have specialties and ideas of their own," he says – combine in music that brings psychedelia, jazz improv and hard rock to the blues idiom.

"I'm more or less just playing what I like," he says. "And I love everything."