2003 Juno winner and 2008 Juno nominee Jack De Keyzer enjoyed himself on stage. (Citizen photo by David Mah)
Written by SCOTT STANFIELD
Citizen staff
Sunday, 22 June 2008
Julian Fauth appeared calm, cool and collected as he smoked a cigarette on the fringes of the crowd, watching the Rae King Blues Band perform at the Railway Blues Festival.
The Toronto-based musician's calm demeanour belied the fact that the Juno-nominated barrelhouse-style piano player was a one-man show at the second annual event, held Saturday at the Railway & Forestry Museum.
"Me, my left hand, my right hand and my feet," said Fauth, who earned a 2006 Juno nomination for his Songs of Vice and Sorrow recording.
He says barrelhouse piano playing is as it sounds - a couple of whiskey barrels with a plank overtop.
"They usually had a piano and they were selling whiskey and somebody would be playing boogie woogie. This goes back to Prohibition and to the days before amplification when a piano was the thing to have in a place like that," said Fauth, who started listening to blues at age six.
His brand of boogie woogie, pre-war piano blues went down like a late afternoon latte, as did the Rae King Band's version of Santana's The Sensitive Kind. In what was likely their final performance in Prince George, RKB entertained the crowd with tunes like Bad Case of Love and Louis Jordan's Blue White Boogie.
"That one was a spot dance," RKB singer/guitarist Mark Roland joked after the band's rendition of Unchain My Heart failed to draw an excess of bodies to the front of the turntable stage. "There would have been free tickets to this event for 10 years."
Roland will soon be leaving Prince George to join his wife Brenda in Winnipeg. The couple co-founded Rae King Blues.
"I know her heart is here," Mark said of Brenda at one point in the set.
Other festival acts included the Karl Standeven Band, the Kathy Frank Band and Single Car Garage. The headliners were Rita Chiarelli and Jack de Keyzer, both of whom are Juno winners.
This year's festival, again presented by the museum and the Prince George chapter of the Blues Underground Network, opened with performances by the provincial-winning Prince George Youth Choir and gospel blues singer Cliff Raphael.
Judging by the overall reaction of the several hundred in attendance, Prince George hopes these first two years of the festival are the start of an annual tradition.
"We'll just have to see," said Blues Underground president Earl Krushelnicki, festival co-organizer along with the museum's Shelley Sivell. "We have to make some changes and do some more things that are positive.
"I have some ideas," he added. "I think there's potential. We have some great volunteers, and the support of the community is excellent. And the performers are excellent."
