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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
The Blues Foundation is an organisation founded in 1980 with the objective to preserve, maintain and help to spread the importance and the significance of Blues music. For over 35 years, The Blues Foundation has been and it still is, the epicenter of the most important events organised in the United States linked to the genre, like Keeping The Blues Alive Awards, Blues Hall Of Fame and International Blues Challenge, among others.
The latter, in particular, is an event that has helped, through the years, several musicians to push further their careers within the music industry, by forging relationships between the artists themselves, independent labels and music veterans of the Blues circuit, allowing the artists as well to open up to new fans coming to watch this very important event in the world of Blues music.
Read more: International Blues Challenge #33 - Various Artists
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
2016's Big Dog was an album that meant a great deal for one of the finest bluesmen around, the Florida-based guitarist and singer/songwriter Albert Castiglia.
Celebrated at the time as Castiglia's finest hour to date, Big Dog was an album that displayed clearly the amount of talent present in Castiglia as a musician in many ways and under different levels. With this in mind, to move forward from an album of this level of excellence must have been not an easy challenge to face for Castiglia, while approaching the writing of the new record.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
Artists that have got something to say through their songs never look at record label's diktats about releasing an album per year, for commercial and strategic purposes. Instead, when the heat of the moment, the inspiration and, most of all, the music comes and it is there, it feels certainly more natural and obvious for musicians to release their bodies of work, when they feel that the time is right.
Samantha Fish belongs to this very rare breed of musicians that is unable to resist to the creative impulse of releasing something that the charismatic guitarist and singer/songwriter considers fresh and actual and that mirrors a particularly happy and prolific stage of her career.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
Some artists really cannot stop producing new and exciting material, especially when they have got something highly valuable to say. British artist Jack J Hutchinson previously released a very well received album, in 2017, called Set Your Heart For The Sun, together with his side project Boom Boom Brotherhood, a record which received numerous and positive accolades by music fans and Music Press but the singer/songwriter, evidently, had more hidden aces up to his sleeves.
Hutchinson's brand new album, called Paint No Fiction captions perfectly one of the most productive and inspired stages in the career of an artist that is able to build great melodies combined with a remarkably solid songwriting style.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
In music, as often happens in life to many of us, individuals need to fight really hard to overcome personal struggles against their own demons, in order to find the energy and the right motivations to then rise again.
This very succinct fact of life seems to be the mirror of what has been happening in later years to the British singer and songwriter Mollie Marriott, an artist whose promising, rising career took a severe down turn back in 2012 for personal reasons. Thankfully, time managed to heal those emotional scars that Marriott was facing and, little by little, the young artist re-gained trust in her artistic skills.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
Music fans have got all different relationships with records. There are some that treat them like mementos of a live concert or of a photo with their favorite artists, others look at records like personal lifeboats in particularly difficult moments of their lives, others simply just love music in its entirety.
When American multi-instrumentalist Guy Davis and Italian harmonica maestro Fabrizio Poggi met many years ago for artistic reasons, they were far away to imagine that their musical partnership and personal friendship would have last for so long and taken them to a roller-coaster journey to the history of American Blues.
Read more: Guy Davis & Fabrizio Poggi - Sonny & Brownie's Last Train
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
When somebody mentions the state of Texas in the United States in a music context, one cannot avoid to associate this beautiful part of America to genres like the blues and the rock, styles that have been always in the musical DNA of this part of the States.
Through times, a new generation of artists is bringing to the Texan music table new, fresh ideas and new intuitions on how to combine the aforementioned genres with alternative layers of sound coming from different times but still resounding very much contemporary and innovative.