Location: Ljubljana / Ljubljanski grad / Slovenia
Date: Friday, 28.06.2019
The last Friday of June 2019 is finally here. Another scorcher of a day, but also the centerpiece of this year’s first edition of Bluesland, the festival that was renamed from Motorcity and moved from Tolmin to Ljubljana, to be exact to Ljubljanski grad. Day two kicked off with Croatian performer Tomislav Goluban and his backing band! An incredibly skilled and nimble harmonica player and vocalist.
Shortly before eight in the evening, this superb, internationally acclaimed harmonica player started his show, and with his quartet behind him he served up a colorful mix of roots blues, country, let’s just say American traditional music, which he curiously spiced up here and there with a bit of ethnic melos from his home Zagorje roots. It was playful all the way through, packed with inventive touches and full-blooded drive, which meant his set gave us a peek at a musician developing his own distinctive musical character, even against the very familiar, homey sound generated by the blues template itself. Tomislav is a guy who gets completely immersed in no time and switches with unbelievable ease between the central role of harmonica player and that of a very good vocal interpreter, and he’s no stranger to a “dance step” either, since he’s constantly stomping and pounding his foot on the floor, setting his own rhythm and commanding his band like a driving engine. He’s a highly respected musician, winner of numerous awards, even a Hohner harmonica endorser, with a rich body of work to boast of, since he keeps releasing albums. The latest, “Chicago Rambler”, came out this year. Definitely a man who, with his energetic, whirlwind temperament, passion and emotional intensity, quickly wins over the sympathies and affection of the crowds. Even though the second day promised only slightly bigger attendance than the first, Tomislav definitely deserved a lot, lot more attention for his proven stage brilliance and his knack for a colorful performance.
Laura Cox! Next up was the hell-raising Laura Cox and her hard-hitting trio! Well, quartet. Laura Cox is first and foremost a rocker, more of a girl who has more in common with Joan Jett and Lita Ford than with the blues. That was announced by her feisty, jagged rock’n’roll attitude, which evoked the levers of good old Judas Priest, Saxon and Thin Lizzy on one side, and the swagger of southern rock on the other. The “sharply dressed girl” in a leather jacket shot lightning from her eyes and you could really feel she was hungry to play. Sadly in front of a modest crowd, but still. There were no brakes and the band kept slapping us around, running across the stage and nimbly making use of all its space. Besides being a guitarist, Laura Cox is also a penetrating singer and has that proud, authoritative presence that grabs the listener’s focus, and at the same time, as a girl, she’s an excellent guitar soloist and a guitar-playing acrobat, who rarely let the additional guitarist take the “front” position, meaning the soloing spot, during the show. Retro-fueled and nostalgic, loaded with a juicy, screeching and piercing curtain of potent guitar riffing and nimble solos. No overcomplicating, just plenty of bold, feisty, high-octane attitude, with which the charismatic musician took the audience over body and soul, and together with her crew delivered a proper retro-hard-heavy rock mass. Laura Cox, a musician of French-English roots, presented her studio debut “Hard Blues Shot” (2017) at Bluesland. And of course she convinced us smoothly! A set I could keep listening to and listening to!
Sven Hammond is an old acquaintance of ours who played last year’s edition of the Motorcity festival in Tolmin and already won us over back then with an outstanding approach. In fact, he arrived at this first edition of Bluesland with the same backing crew, in which the extremely lively and agile vocalist Jared Grant, the only newcomer in the lineup, grabbed the attention. Sven Hammond, originally Sven Figee, started the stage show with an extended opening jam where the band warmed up their limbs and fingers, and the otherwise excellent and experienced Dutch “hammondist” quickly moved to the center of the action once he rolled out some proudly chunky Hammond lines, which he embellished with soloing wit and flair. At this show too, the band presented the still current studio album “Ritual” (2017), from which Ceasar and the title track found a place in the set. The show was opened by Moet Jit Wete, followed by The Usual Suspect, Hero, the rock’n’roll-sharpened Happy People,… An excellent blues funk fusion band, in a fully tangible balance between jamming and musical accessibility, with a rhythmically flirty charm. Sven is a master of his craft, the band builds an incredible groove, sounds tight and well-rehearsed, and the chemistry between them suggests a crew that knows each other extremely well! Pure power!
Richie Kotzen, as the headliner of the festival’s second day, naturally delivered the festival’s peak that day too. Kotzen has always performed as a hard-hitting trio, with two more virtuosos alongside him. A bassist and a drummer, who aren’t permanent members and as a rule stick around in their spots for only a few tours, since Kotzen is regarded as a singer-songwriter and solo artist who, besides being an excellent guitarist and singer, has gradually become an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and producer too, which means he can do everything in the studio all by himself. With a flood of constantly emerging creative ideas and free-spirited notions, a musician like that also needs a huge amount of room and freedom to develop and express himself freely. A new studio album is in the works, while the current one, his twentieth overall, “Salting Earth”, came out the year before last. On this visit to Slovenia, Kotzen again fully charmed and enchanted us. Overall, though, the show felt very routine. Simply. His fingers and vocal cords have that much mileage. And Kotzen, who in his purism, chasing organic vibrations and natural tones, switched to bare-fingered picking a good while ago and completely dropped the pick, is growing over the years into such a refined and soft, literally filigree-sensitive artist that the guitar, in its moaning, literally brings all of the artist’s emotions to life. A soulful vocal, which you’d swear belongs to a Black musician when you close your eyes, is maturing like a good old wine, and above all that we hear in his compositions, Kotzen is also inspired by Motown acts and loves the tight musicality of pop outfits like Hall & Oates. His groove is not primarily blues, but the music, while it has blues at its core, also brings, in the melting pot of expressive fusion, plenty of hard rock, pop, soul and even jazz fusion elements. Richie Kotzen is thus an absolute musical oddball and one of a kind. He also uses a nice helping of sweep picking technique, which fits playing without a pick perfectly and gives his style an extra touch of the unusual, or rather the unique. His soloing is a brush with magical swagger, and when he finds himself behind the mic, he deftly swaps the role of brilliant guitarist for that of an equally brilliant singer. The guitar virtuoso and outstanding vocalist played, among others, Peace Sign, Love Is Blind, Remember, Fear, Bad Situation, Doin’ What The Devil Says to Do, the new Venom, where he bewitched with a superb band-in-the-riff feel while singing demanding vocal lines, then Stand from his days with Poison, Go Faster and Fooled Again – the last three toward the end.
Interestingly, Kotzen played most of the show on a cream-colored Fender Stratocaster and used his standard “Tele” only at the start. A man who once again cast a spell with his performance and his velvety touch. Those were the expectations too, and Kotzen met them with feather-light ease. The second day ended with another brilliant set from the one and only Kotzen.
text: Aleš Podbrežnik & Primož Novak
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
