Q104 Welcomes Colin James - April 19, 2019 - Rebecca Cohn Auditorium
CONCERT IS SOLD OUT!
Dalhousie Arts Centre Box Office (6101 University Ave.), by phone at (902) 494-3820 / 1-800-874-1669 and online at artscentre.dal.ca and evenko.ca.
With his 19th album, Miles to Go (out Sept. 21), Colin James is getting back to the
blues.
Wait a minute, you ask: hasn’t Colin James always played the blues? Well, yes, but
back when he was signed to his first record deal in 1988, his producer—who’d
worked with Ray Charles and Derek and the Dominoes—explicitly told him not to
play any blues, because the label expected a pop hit. When James later made one of
the biggest albums of his career—1993’s Colin James and the Little Big Band,
released years before the so-called “swing revival”—his label hated it, as did critics
and many fans before it went on to go triple platinum in Canada. Then there was the
acoustic blues album National Steel in 1997, made with Colin Linden, which was the
first time James made a full-on blues album, which landed him on folk festival bills
alongside the likes of John Prine and John Hiatt. It was an explicit embrace of the
blues James had loved since the Regina-born guitarist was 16 years old and was
blown away by James Cotton at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. A song that Cotton
played that night, “One More Mile,” became the title track to the new album:
bookending it in electric and acoustic versions.