Ben and Valerie Turner. (photo credit:PR)
The Blues Festival in Tel Aviv extends to Jerusalem
Local blues fans must be in seventh heaven. Before Yamit Hagar came on the scene three years ago, pickings were relatively slim. The Tel Aviv Blues Festival last June helped to up the ante a couple of notches. That followed Hagar’s debut offering of Mississippi bluesman Robert Belfour in 2012, with a string of other highprofile roots bluesmen thereafter playing to packed audiences.
The Israeli blues market will receive another push in the desired direction when the next installment of the TA Blues Festival takes place. This time, however, the momentum churned up by four-day event (December 2-5), will be maintained by an additional seven days of shows in Jerusalem (December 6-12).
The stellar imports include a return to these shores by charismatic multiinstrumentalist Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton and 70something Louisianaborn guitarist-harmonica playervocalist Lil’ Jimmy Reed and the Piedmont Bluz Acoustic Duo.
The latter twosome comprises husband and wife Ben and Valerie Turner, who will strut their stuff at both ends of Route 1 in the first week of December.
Valerie says that her musical pathway evolved from a chance encounter of a more visual than sonic nature. “I stumbled upon the blues when I purchased a book which I bought because I thought the photographs in it were very interesting,” says the guitarist-singer.
“They reminded me of the scenery you would see if you lived in the South, along the east coast.”
The images in the book connected neatly with Valerie’s familial background. “My mother and father came from the southern part of the country, and when I saw the pictures in the book it reminded me of their childhood,” she recalls.
The photographs soon drew her into a direction from which there was to be no return. “As I was reading, I was learning about this interesting [blues] music. And once I heard it, I really loved it, and I knew that I wanted to play it,” she says.
The existence of blues music wasn’t entirely foreign to Valerie, but she was not into the original roots format of the genre that hailed from the Deep South. “I knew about more modern forms of blues, the electric blues, but I had not heard the acoustic version that preceded it,” she says.
read more: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Jazz-Country-blues-take-me-home-434546
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