It is now 19 years ago since label founder Thomas Ruf first sent three musicians under contract to his record company on a joint tour as Blues Caravan: Sue Foley, Candye Kane and Ana Popovic. For the 2024 edition of this package tour, this job fell to Katarina Pejak, Eric Johanson and label newcomer Alastair Greene, who, as in previous years, were also supported by a two-piece rhythm section.
The performances followed the tried and tested pattern, i.e. after a joint opening, each of the three played their own set with songs from their respective repertoire, before they all gathered on stage again for the finale to round off the gig with another joint performance of songs such as Dr. John's voodoo anthem "I Walk On Guilded Splinters" or the Elmore James cover "One Way Out", which is an integral part of the Allman Brothers' live repertoire.
This was also the case in April 2024 at the Blues Garage in Isernhagen near Hanover, where the trio's performance was recorded for this CD/DVD set, with 16 tracks on the CD and 27 songs on the DVD thanks to the higher storage capacity.
On that evening in April, they started with the Robert Johnson classic "Come On In My Kitchen", which they performed together, and then it was Katarina Pejak's turn to perform the first solo set. The singer, keyboardist and songwriter from Belgrade performed her own material as well as a version of the Pink Floyd classic "Money" on her setlist, which can also be found on her studio album "Pearls On A String", which was released at the start of the tour.
While Pejak had already gained Blues Caravan experience in 2019, the participation of her colleagues in the tour was a first for both. And while her current release marks her second studio album with Ruf Records after 2019's "Roads That Cross", both Johanson's "The Deep And The Dirty" and Greene's "Standing Out Loud" are their label debut. And Pejak also differs stylistically from the two, because while she usually tends to cultivate softer tones, both Louisiana-born Johanson and California-born Greene, once Alan Parsons' tour guitarist among other things, prefer guitar sounds of a heavier kind, enriched with plenty of distortion. Examples of this on this concert recording include Johanson's powerfully grooving "Undertow" and Greene's riff-driven "Am I Too Blame?". It is not only on these tracks that both prove to be representatives of blues rock in which the emphasis is predominantly on the second syllable of the word.
Last but not least, drummer Christin Neddens and bassist Tomek Germann, both professionals, were able to take the different stylistic accents of the three tour protagonists into account with their playing
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