Spoonful
Of Blues ( N )
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feel
extremely enthusiastic about playing at your Sunflower River Blues
Festival; this is a really big thing for us to do,” comments Jens
Haugen, bass player for the celebrated Norwegian band, Spoonful of Blues.
In a cultural exchange funded by
Coahoma Community College, the band’s four musicians from Notodden,
Norway, Clarksdale’s European sister city in blues, will be special
performers on the Blues Alley stage at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 10.
“I feel it is like a pilgrimage
to go to Mississippi, to sense some of the atmosphere of ‘the cradle of
blues,’” continues Haugen who recently toured Holland, Switzerland and
Germany with Ike Turner.
A champion of Norwegian blues since the sixties. When his mother
bought him his first record player, Haugen recalls standing on a box to
reach the store counter and making his first record purchase, “St. Louis
Blues.”
“The band’s music is deeply rooted in the hard-hitting
and hypnotizing grooves and rhythms of Mississippi blues,” says harp
player Jostein Forsberg describing the group’s latest CD, Three Car
Garage,
He attributes the CD’s rave media reviews
including high praise from Norway’s top blues programmer Geir Hovig to
the band’s knowledge of “sacred music” (from Mississippi).
“That’s why they can mix elements of old
Norwegian culture from their home area of Telemark and West African
elements in their blues with natural elegance and turn it into a kind of
world music,” Forsberg said.
Since 1989, Forsberg has worked with the
Notodden Blues Festival, the largest in northern Europe. He and his family
have visited Clarksdale several times, and Forsberg was surprised once on
his birthday with a special party at Evelyn Turner’s Crossroads Club.
“I have really good feelings for Clarksdale;
it has sort of become my home away from home,” says Forsberg.
“When times are getting tough, I want to go
to Clarksdale; it is the whole Mississippi atmosphere and the warmth of
the people that makes me keep on coming back,” he continued. “For my
music and work with European Blues Centre, it is really a refill of energy
for me.”
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