Powder Blues
Stage 2 | 7:45 pm to 9:00 pm
For nearly three decades Powder Blues has been Canada’s favorite blues band. Their music incorporates elements of Swing, Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll and Rhythm & Blues into their unique and instantly identifiable sound. This broad approach has resulted in an appeal whose demographic is so wide that it is not unusual to find people from seven to seventy swaying side by side at a Powder Blues concert. Throughout the years they have toured ceaselessly throughout Canada, the United States and overseas, spreading the joy of a music that makes people smile and dance.
Fads come and go, as in the current resurgence of Swing, Juke and Jive music, but Powder Blues is no follower of trends. When they first burst upon the recording scene in late 1979, with their self-financed and self-produced debut album, ‘Uncut’, after nearly two years of wood shedding and honing their unique blend of sounds in Vancouver’s then flourishing nightclub scene, the established recording industry label giants shrugged their effort off as ‘not commercial’. The band was told there was ‘no market for the blues’.
Undiscouraged, the band pressed the album at their own expense and proceeded to sell it off stage and deliver it to radio stations. When the switchboards at the stations lit up with calls asking ‘who’s that?’ other stations followed suit. After selling nearly 30,000 copies in a matter of weeks, the major record labels came calling and entered a bidding war for the band’s services and the right to distribute this ‘non-commercial’ product nationally. RCA won the contract and to date that album has gone on to sell over a million copies worldwide.
Band highlights include winning Canada’s most prestigious National Music Award, the Juno, in 1981, headlining and recording a live album at the world famous Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1983, being presented with the W.C. Handy Award in Memphis, Tennessee in 1986 and touring the Soviet Union and being released on Melodya Records in 1990. They have appeared in concert with such legendary names as Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, James Brown, Albert Collins, James Cotton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the Who, ZZ Top, the Doobie Brothers, Edgar Winter and Tower of Power.
The Powder Blues latest CD titled ‘blues + jazz = BLAZZ!’ on Blue Wave Records which was released in 2004. The band continues to tour regularly and has never played less than 40 shows and sometimes as many as 300 shows in each of the 28 years they have been performing.
Sep 07, 2010
Complete our survey for a chance to win a 3 day pass to the 2011 Nakusp Music Festival!!!
Take a few minutes to provide us with your honest feedback and you can be entered…
Read More
Aug 29, 2010
Check out our 2010 photos in our gallery - new ones will be added every day!
Click on the arrow button next to “Category Jump Navigation” to see photos from our archives!
Read More
Aug 17, 2010
Tickets and camping go on sale in mid-October!
We’ve been receiving lots of requests to book for 2011 - watch our website in the…
Read More
