Let The Blues Begin

These are boom times in Alberta, although judging by the headlines, there are also plenty of blues to go around: high hopes are tempered by high rents and high prices.

It's pretty much a dead certainty, then, that at some point, if you live here, you're gonna run smack dab into a big ol' case of the blues. And the blues lead to dancing, which gets the performers going at the annual Edmonton Labatt Blues Festival.

"Well now, that's what we can do when we've got a good blues crowd in front of us," offered harmonica ace Mitch Kashmar as the dance floor filled to the brim for the second of three performers during the festival kickoff last night in Hawrelak Park.

GETTING OVER IT

For all the problems of the workaday Alberta world, there are also few places that offer so many chances to get away from it all and be entertained as Edmonton in summer. And the epicentre of getting over it is the Blues Fest.

"All of the songs we do are love songs," Kashmar offered, before ripping through Dirty Deal, a sweet shuffle off his debut Delta Groove Records CD, Nickels and Dimes.

Kashmar plays the chromatic harmonica, a more complex version of the instrument and used to full effect by the Santa Barbara native. Kashmar was nominated as best blues harmonica player at last year's Blues Music Awards. But as his two albums attest, the real surprise is when Kashmar belts out a tune, revealing soulful, nuanced vocals.

BACKWARD SHUFFLE

He ran through tunes from both 2005's Nickels and Dimes and last year's followup, Wake Up and Worry. There was the up-tempo backward shuffle Show it to me, in which Kashmar threatens to "strip buck naked and run off through the woods."

The funky title track of his first disc, Nickels and Dimes, has the ring of the instant classic, and even though Kashmar can't really claim to be widely known, the tune is already covered right here at Blues on Whyte from time to time, so it was a shame not to hear it last night. He made up for it, though, with a wild Chicano instrumental piece and a killer take on Muddy Waters' Sugar Sweet.

The 2007 Edmonton Labatt Blues Festival, Hawrelak Park
Amphitheatre, starring Elvin Bishop, Mitch Kashmar and the Du-Rite Aces.

Note Perfect: Mitch Kashmar on Whiskey Drinking Woman, in which she has "whiskey with her whiskey."

Sour Note: None, really, although organizer Cam Hayden's sales job of Billy Goat Hill wine as 'better than the bouquet from an aborigine's armpit' certainly brought sour smells to the imagination.