Fountain Blues & Brews Festival is in growth mode.
The longtime blues music gathering doubled in size, going from a single-day affair to a two-day fandango, in its 42nd year.
And what was the response from blues lovers across the Bay Area?
The festival ended up drawing its biggest crowd ever — pushing toward 3,000 people at Plaza de Cesar Chavez in downtown San Jose — on Saturday (June 14), according to Fountain Blues Foundation Board Member Dan Orloff.
The main attraction was young blues superstar Christone “Kingfish” Ingram — who is pretty much the hottest name in the genre — topping a Day 1 bill that also included such major talents as Sacramento’s Kyle Rowland Band, Fresno fret master AC Myles and guitar great Kid Andersen’s Greaseland All Stars.
The Day 2 bill — a big Father’s Day finale set for Sunday — also wasn’t short on talent, with legendary New Jersey bluesman Walter Trout set to take the stage following sets by Vanessa Collier and Laura Chavez, Aki Kumar’s Bollywood Blues Band, Alabama Mike and The Revelators and others.
Tickets are still available for the Sunday show. Visit fountainblues.com for details.
The big-name headliner, the record-setting turnout and the top-to-bottom excellent musicianship on display definitely made for a triumphant Day 1 for the Bay Area’s longest-running blues festival, which got its start as a student-run event at San Jose State University in 1981 and moved to its present home at Plaza de Cesar Chavez in 2015.
Some have linked the jump in ticket sales to the box office success of Oakland director Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.” Thanks to the the music in that film, people who haven’t talked about the blues in years — if, indeed, ever — are now buzzing about the genre. In that sense, this lasting legacy of this really good horror movie may well prove to be the shot-in-the-arm given to the blues.
Of course, the correlation between the success of the film and the festival was strengthened by the presence of Kingfish on the bill. The young vocalist-guitarist, who absolutely blew me away when I first saw him perform at the 2023 BottleRock Napa Valley festival, is featured in “Sinners.”
Despite the presence of a legitimate blues superstar on the bill, the festival still had plenty of its regular mellow, low-key charm, as people sat on blankets and beach chairs and chatted with each other between bites of barbecue and burritos. A huge portion of the overall Bay Area blues community turns out to this event, so you can hear devotees catching up about upcoming gigs and making future plans. I walked around a bit with vocalist-guitarist J.C. Smith (who is pretty much the Mayor of the San Jose Blues Scene) and he must have been stopped by fans/friends — for hugs, handshakes and hellos — at least a dozen times during a 20-minute period.
The music took place on two stages, with the sets bumping up against each other so that you could basically rock to the blues nonstop from the time the first guitar was strummed at a little after 11 a.m. to when the headliner finished up at around 8 p.m.
Two of the best sets I saw on Saturday took place on the secondary Poor House Bistro Stage, where Sacramento harmonica great Kyle Rowland led his band in a fun set of blues and then Fresno’s AC Myles showed why he’s one of the Central Valley’s greatest gifts to the genre.
I also really enjoyed the energetic offering from Kid Andersen’s Greaseland All Stars on the big Main Stage, especially once the legendary Fillmore Slim — aka, “The West Coast Godfather of the Game” — joined the party. Slim, now 90, can still rock a crowd like nobody’s business.
The festival hit its zenith, as expected, once Kingfish and his terrific band hit the Main Stage. The Grammy winner, who won the best contemporary blues album trophy with 2021’s “662” (named after the area code of his native Clarksdale, Mississippi native), lived up to all the advance hype as he delivered a crowd-pleasing 90-minute set.
His guitar work is absolutely incendiary — and he’d give fans a chance to experience his fret work in an up-close-and-personal manner later in the set as he left the stage and walked right out into the audience. And he soloed all the way, never once breaking his musical stride as he worked his way into the heart of the crowd and burned through note after note while hundreds of cell phones caught all the action.
That’s the kind of experience that music lovers will still be talking about for days to come. And it’s yet one more sign why the Bay Area’s longest-running blues festival may well still have its best days ahead of it.