‘World Blues’ tour will invade Logan
A blues music concert tour celebrating the global influence of blues music will stop for showings in Logan’s Ellen Eccles Theatre Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
World Blues, with headlining act by multi-Grammy Award winner Taj Mahal and with supporting acts by South African guitarist and vocalist Vusi Mahlasela and Fredericks Brown, a R&B group featuring Mahal’s daughter, Deva Mahal, will begin at 7:30 p.m. each night.
Amanda Castillo, the program director at the Cache Valley Center for the Arts, which booked the World Blues performance, said the tour is the first time these artists have all shared the same stage.
“Vusi has recorded with Taj Mahal in the past,” Castillo said, “They wanted to bring together a couple different components of the world-blues arena. They put together this tour to celebrate blues and bring it to the stage.”
Castillo said the performers, who are natives of various countries around the world including South Africa, the U.S. and New Zealand, can together accomplish a blend of musical skills, creating a culturally diverse performance.
“It’s going to be a great kind of trio of three totally different sounds from very different places,” Castillo said.
This diversity and variety will be displayed as the the artists take the stage to perform both individually and together as a larger group.
Mahal, who will be accompanied by his band, the Taj Mahal Trio, has been influential to blues music throughout the world over the course of his five-decade-long career, Castillo said. Inspiration for Mahal’s music has been a culmination of musical influence from West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, India and the Hawaiian islands, she said.
Castillo said she has heard requests from the community to have a performance by Mahal in the area for some time. The Logan performance is the only stop in Utah on the World Blues tour.
In accompaniment to Mahal’s performance, Castillo said Mahlasela’s music, which has been greatly influenced by his upbringing in South Africa during Apartheid, is filled with powerful messages delivered by a skilled musician.
“Vusi is an amazing performer,” she said. “Getting to see him, it is something I am overly excited for.”
Because the performers have known and worked with each other in the past, Castillo said the performance will be different than many others in which the performers are strangers to one another.
“I think it’s going to be a really nice show because often there is a detachment between group,” she said. “For World Blues, there will be more to it because of these relationships.”
Before Wednesday’s performance the theatre will open for a matinee show for more than 1,000 young Cache Valley students, who Castillo said “would not otherwise have the opportunity to see a show like this.”
Tickets for the performance range in price from $30 to $44. Students who present a valid school identification may purchase tickets at a 25-percent reduced rate.