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Sugar Blue

Harp Monster

Grammy Award-winning harmonica virtuoso Sugar Blue is not your typical bluesman. Born James Whiting - he was raised in Harlem, New York, where his mother was a singer and dancer at the fabled Apollo Theatre. He spent his childhood among the musicians and show people who knew his mother, including the great Billie Holiday, and decided that he wanted to be a performer. Sugar Blue received his first harmonica from his aunt, and proceeded to hone his chops by wailing along with Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder songs on the radio, he was soon to be influenced by the jazz greats such as Dexter Gordon and Lester Young. Sugar Blue has used this background to his advantage, though, creating an ultra-modern blues style and sound that is instantly recognizable as his own. Sugar Blue began his career as a street musician and made his first recordings in 1975 with legendary blues figures Brownie McGhee and Roosevelt Sykes. The following year, he contributed to recordings by Victoria Spivey and Johnny Shines before pulling up stakes and moving to Paris on the advice of pioneer blues pianist Memphis Slim. While in France, Sugar Blue hooked up with members of the Rolling Stones, who instantly fell in love with his sound. The Stones invited Sugar Blue to join them in the studio. Besides his work on the Some Girls album, he can be heard on Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You. He appeared live with the group on numerous occasions and was offered the session spot indefinitely, but he turned it down, opting instead to return to the States and put his own band together rather than became a full-time sideman. Before returning to the U.S. in 1982, Sugar Blue cut a pair of albums, Crossroads and From Paris to Chicago. Sugar Blue's decision to return home, despite his growing renown as a session player, was spurred by his desire to work with and learn from the masters of blues harmonica. Thus he came to Chicago and proceeded to sit in with the likes of Big Walter Horton, Carey Bell, James Cotton and Junior Wells. Sugar Blue went on to spend two years touring with his friend and mentor Willie Dixon as part of the Chicago Blues All Stars before putting his own band together in 1983. With his own band, Sugar Blue's star continued to rise. He received the 1985 Grammy Award for his work on the Atlantic album, Blues Explosion, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. He recorded on Willie Dixon's Grammy-winning Hidden Charms album in 1989. He has appeared across America, Europe and Africa at many prestigious festivals - Zurich, Den Haag, Antibes, Nice, Cannes, Montreal, Chicago, Pistoia, Bern, and has performed on festival stages with classic artists like Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Art Blakey and Lionel Hampton. Sugar Blue continues to appear in clubs and festivals around the world and has also set his sights on television and the big screen. He sat in with Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Jerry Lee Lewis for the Cinemax special, Fats Domino and Friends, and has appeared on screen and in the musical score of Alan Parker's acclaimed 1987 thriller Angel Heart, starring Robert De Niro. Sugar Blue incorporates what he has learned into his visionary and singular style, technically dazzling yet wholly soulful. He bends, shakes, spills flurries of notes with simultaneous precision and abandon, combining dazzling technique with smoldering expressiveness and gives off enough energy to light up several city square blocks... And sings too! His distinctive throat tends to be overlooked in the face of his instrumental virtuosity - he's got a rich, sensual voice with a whisper of huskiness which by itself would be something out of the ordinary. But oh, there's that harmonica again...

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