A Tip of the Hat from the Blues Foundation-- Blues Asia Network

A Tip of the Hat from the Blues Foundation

The mother-ship of blues, the Blues Foundation in Memphis, Tennessee, is currently running on the front page of its website a very nice article about blues in the Philippines, including a paragraph about Blues Asia TV. Here it is:

BLUES IN THE PHILIPPINES

The Philippine Blues Society is sponsoring an act for the Youth Showcase. The Bleu Rascals have their Philippine passports and are looking forward to their trip to Memphis. The Philippine International Jazz Festival recently featured the Rascals as the opening band for Scott Henderson, Jeff Berlin and Dennis Chambers last weekend. U.S. Embassy staff have discovered the young band, filling the legendary Hobbit House, which is only a few blocks away from the Embassy, at its last gig there.

In the meantime, blues is making amazing progress in the Philippines right now. A year ago, one was lucky to find one blues event a week in Manila. This week, there has been live blues available every night of the week except Sunday, and tomorrow night there will be gigs featuring three prominent blues bands [including the Rascals] in three of the most important alternative music venues in town. Most of the important venues are now booking blues on some nights — and I learned just today that a new blues & jazz club will be opening soon in the upper-class Makati section of town, joining the Backdoor Blues Cafe over the in blue-collar part of town. Also, a local blues guitarist/vocalist is among the 20 nominees for most “liked” guitar in the Philippines — and he’s currently way ahead in the voting!

Thomas Colvin has launched BLUES ASIA TV, finally making his live online streaming show available on-demand to viewers world-wide. The live show runs for two hours, more or less, on Sunday nights. They are splitting the show into two hour-long segments for posting on its blog and YouTube, with segments being available every Tuesday and Friday. The show covers blues all over Asia and the Pacific, and the response since setting up the Blues Asia Network some months ago is quite gratifying. You can catch the show at bluesasianetwork.com and it also posted at several places on Facebook.

*****

EDITOR: Thanks for the Blues Foundation for these very kind words.

This post was written by

Thomas Colvin – who has written 147 posts on Blues Asia Network.
Thomas "Tomcat" Colvin is an American expat, residing in Manila since 1986. He is best known in the Philippines as the harp player with LAMPANO ALLEY [now in hibernation], with lots of videos on YouTube. Google will also tell you more than you want to know about him. Currently, he is the administrator of the Blues Asia Network. And he flies around Asia tooting his harp.