JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: The Jerry Fink Date: 03/2010 Writer: n/a

Raging Ricci Makes Encore Performance at Boulder Station Blues Night

Traditional-blues-shattering performer Jason Ricci returns to Las Vegas Thursday night, his first engagement here since August when he thrilled audiences in two shows – one at Boulder Station and one at Texas Station.

That was his introduction to Vegas, his debut.

Those were the days when Station Casinos experimented with expanding its long-running Boulder Blues Series, a free night of entertainment that features some of the best blues performers in the country.

The experiment didn’t work out, perhaps because the town has fallen on hard times, so anyone who is as fascinated with the unusual performance by one of the blues world’s most fanciful acts should plan on arriving early at Boulder Station to get a seat at his second Vegas engagement.

This should be a standing room only performance, but that isn’t always the case.

“Some places don’t get us,” Ricci said during a telephone interview from Boulder, Colo., where he had a gig and was suffering from a case of the hives. “We’re too avant-garde I guess.”

But not too avant-garde for Europe, where he spends a lot of time these days.

“We make a lot of money over there, do a lot of gigs,” he says.

He tours the entire United States, but finds his best audiences to be in Florida, New York and Colorado.

Vegas audiences aren’t too bad either, judging from the attendance at his last two engagements.

One of those most impressed by the harmonica player/vocalist was reviewer Mark Whittington.

Whittington wrote in the Las Vegas Sun:

“He's such an out-of-the-box performer. He's part Jim Morrison, part Junior Wells, part Iggy Pop, part Toots Thielemans part Judy Garland, part Lee Oskar.

“I've seen a lot of really good harp players -- including Thielemans and John Popper, Oskar and Magic Dick, Charlie Musselwhite and Howard Levy and all those great guys from the Bay Area.

But I have never seen anyone do what Ricci does. He has all that speed plus touch and sensitivity, amazing breath control, great tone. He has absolute control of all those foot pedals and both his harp mic and his vocal mic.

“There were times when he was doing all those standard harmonica virtuoso riffs -- the stuff you see all the great players do once or twice in a night -- and then he'd just blow them up and take them in another direction. And he was doing great stuff on every song. Suddenly he'd be playing an improvised Bach fugue. Then on the next song, it sounded like a calliope was rolling through the club. Sometimes he sounded like an organ or a heavy metal guitar or a steel drum. Sometimes he sounded like a woman moaning or a locomotive.”

Whittington captured the essence of a performance by Ricci and his riveting band.

At least on those two nights.

His next show could be entirely different.

“We never do the same show twice,” he says. “It’s different every time.”

There is a lot of spontaneity.

“It’s based on audience reaction, primarily,” Ricci says. “We play to the audience, what they seem to like. But sometimes I go in the opposite direction and do what they don’t like.”

Ricci has released two CDs, “Rocket Number 9” and “Done with the Devil.”

He will begin recording a third album in May, which should be out in November.

But recorded music doesn’t capture the vitality of Ricci’s stage performance.

Whittington continues:

“If you hear that stuff on record, it's just a recording. It could be overdubbed. It could be a synthesizer. I mean the calliope sound could be a calliope. I had the same feeling watching Jason Ricci the first time I saw (eight-string guitarist) Charlie Hunter. You don't get it unless you see it. But Hunter is a just a player, Ricci is a performer.

“There were times where you wonder if he's going to slit his wrists on stage. He looks like he's ready to burst apart at the seams. But he's in total control. He's posing and smoking and controlling the band with punches and little flicks of his hands. He turned to the drummer and imperceptibly rolled his wrists to get him to speed the whole thing up. At one point Ricci is doing a handstand parallel to the stage, at another point he’s playing the harmonica with a cat mask on, then he's down on his hands and knees retching looking like he's going to cough up a hair ball.”

Ricci says his goal is to be “super rich and famous.”

It was a flippant comment, made in jest.

At least I think it was.

If he was serious he should perhaps rethink his career – there are a lot easier ways to become super rich and famous than singing the blues.

Who: Jason Ricci & New Blood

When: 8 p.m. Thursday

Where: Railhead at Boulder Station

Admission: free