SLO Blues Society Presents: Janiva Magness

| 14 March 2009

To say that Janiva Magness is an award winning vocalist is an understatement. She won the Blues Music Award for Best Contemporary Female Artist in 2006 and 2007, and is nominated in four categories in 2009, including Album of the Year for her most recent release What Love Will Do (Alligator Records). Her 2006 release Do I Move You? was the #1 record of the year on the Blues Radio airplay charts, while her 2004 release Bury Him At The Crossroads won a Canadian Maple Blues Award. Magness was recently featured on the cover of Blues Revue, who called her “one of the greatest success stories on today’s scene.”

As a Blues Society who hosts dance concerts, we try to counteract the impression that the Blues is uniformly sad. Blues music has a long tradition of embedding adult themed lyrics in danceable compositions, built around cathartic minor chords and driven by a distinctive rhythm. It’s a form that allows performers to express a range of emotions, a point reinforced by these excerpts from Steve Daniel’s review of What Love Will Do for BluesWax, “The opening cut, “That's What Love Will Make You Do,” is a rocker featuring a peremptory declaration of love and simultaneous vulnerability. It's followed by “I Want a Love,” which shifts the album into its prevailing mid-tempo Soul mode…Subsequent covers by such luminaries as Al Green, Little Milton, Annie Lennox, and Bill Withers seesaw between the seductive blandishments of a besotted lover, the plaintive laments of a spurned paramour, and the assertiveness of a survivor of amorous heartbreak…Her voice brings up echoes of Bonnie Raitt, Mavis Staples, and even Aretha Franklin, but like that of all great singers, it is her distinctive own.” As Magness says, “For me the blues has been about redemption, about healing. This kind of music requires that you don’t hold back any pain, and you don’t hold back any joy."

For more information about Janiva Magness visit her website.