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Al Harris

When Al Harris made an unscheduled guest appearance with the Sons of Blues at last year’s Chicago Blues Festival, an international audience learned what habitues of Maxwell Street, the now-defunct Delta Fish Market at Jackson and Kedzie, and neighborhood joints like Mr. Tee’s have known for years: that he’s a charismatic, soulful singer and showman […]

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(International) Noise Conspiracy

In the liner notes to their 1999 singles collection The First Conspiracy, this Swedish garage band identified themselves as “a secret society, an underground, a group of urban terrorists aiming to question and attack every instance of our culture.” When the Canadian Web site World Wide Punk subsequently asked Dennis Lyxzen, the band’s front man […]

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A.C. Reed & the Sparkplugs

Veteran saxophonist A.C. Reed is something of an anomaly among contemporary blues hornmen: his style seems to owe more to the raucous guitar sound of early-60s Chicago guitarists like Buddy Guy than to the roadhouse honkers who usually provide the inspiration for blues horn blowers. His repertoire consists primarily of straight-ahead Chicago-style burners interspersed with […]