Sometimes you just get lucky, that's all there is to it. You go to a bar and the band playing just blows you away. You'd never heard of them before and you still wouldn't know who they were if you hadn't happened to go out that night.
Every so often my wife gets the urge to go out dancing and the hardest part is finding music to dance to. She's not interested in going to any of the "dance" clubs with music that will turn your brain into shredded wheat and a night that usually ends in a knife fight out on the street or some other such drunken stupidity.
There aren't many adult bars in Kingston, Ontario where we live that have live music you can dance to and where she would feel comfortable with the crowd. Thankfully, there is one and when she phoned that Saturday to find out who was playing, she was told it was some blues guy who was really good and who played music you could dance to.
As I'm not physically able to go dancing, I didn't go with her and her friends, but I was awake when she came home. Normally, she'll just talk about some amusing incident and then just head for bed, but on this night she couldn't stop talking about the band she had seen. She'd even gone so far as to ask them for a CD so I could review it for them.
It takes a lot for her to get that excited about some band she's seen in a bar, so I was intrigued. I picked up the CD to check out the packaging and see if I knew anyone associated with the band. They were out of Toronto, Ontario where I had lived for most of my life, so the chance of me knowing them wasn't too far-fetched, but, in this case, I drew a complete blank. The only connection I was able to make being they occasionally played with a guitarist I knew of, Jack deKeyzer.
So who was this David Rotundo and what made him so good that my wife wouldn't shut up about him and his band's music for a couple hours after coming home? Well, the easiest way of finding out was to listen to the CD she brought home and check him out for myself.
Blues Ignited by David Rotundo and his band is fourteen tracks of really good electric blues you don't expect to hear from a bar band. The primary reason is these guys aren't a bar band – they are a blues band who happen to play the bar circuit. Like so many other blues musicians these days, there really isn't any other place for them to play.
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