KENNY "BLUES BOSS" WAYNE @ LE PETIT CHICAGO - WED., JUNE 1

The Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne’ Show at Viree Blues Boreale at Le Petit Chicago, on June 1st, is the world launching of his all new album, An Old Rock on a Roll. It’s the date that this new opus will become available worldwide.

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Gatineau, May 26th, 2011

World premier CD launch celebrated with a highly colored show
to wrap up the 13th edition of Viree Blues Boreale

For a few years now, Viree Blues Boreale’s producers have wanted to treat you and themselves to this Star of the Blues. He is now starting a world tour to promote his new CD, An Old Rock on a Roll, an album produced by none other than the famous Duke Robillard, co-founder of the Roomful of Blues Band and a member of The Fabulous Thunderbirds. The “Blues Boss” will stop over in the region for one night only, on June 1st, at Viree Blues Boreale. So, you will be the very first in the world to whom the "Blues Boss" in person will present his new opus. After his recent week-long performance at the famous Jazz Club of the hotel Meridien Etoile in Paris, France, this pianist emeritus, multiple nominee and recipient of Juno and Maple Blues Awards, always resplendent in a brightly colored, French custom-tailored stage suit, will demonstrate again to a likely full room why he’s "one of the true 'missing links' between the past (Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree, Fats Domino...) and modern-day blues piano players ... !

Kenneth Wayne Spruell, aka Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne, was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1944, and spent his early years in New Orleans with his Louisiana-born parents. He was eight, and already a child prodigy on piano, when he moved with his family to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles. Since the '80s, he’s been based in Vancouver, B.C. Encouraged by his preacher father, the Reverend Matthew Spruell, to play gospel music, he was also secretly introduced to the radically more exciting boogie-woogie by an uncle.

By his early teen years, in the late '50s, Kenny Wayne was playing dozens of gigs, notably at the legendary Alpha Bowling Club with the great Jimmy Reed, among others. In those years, in the crowded, smoky, alcohol-fueled clubs, as it also was in Hull’s “Little Chicago”, vicious brawls could erupt with blood-spraying fights with broken bottles. Those tough situations pretty well ended his blues career for some 20 years. It didn’t stop his music, however. By the end of the '60s, he was onstage with the cream of the Los Angeles soul and R&B scene, playing with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, Billy Preston and members of Sly & The Family Stone and the Doobie Brothers.

After seeing the world from Texas to Hawaii and from Peoria to Paris, it’s on various stages of British Columbia and the Prairies that he rediscovered his own blues roots and officially turned into Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne, from the title of Amos Milburn’s Motown comeback album.

His fresh approach to classic Blues styles shines in his original self-penned compositions inspired by legendary musicians such as Amos Milburn and Bill Doggett. Those names were indeed too fast forgotten and need to be rediscovered by present-day blues fans. His compositions earned him recognition in Canada. In the 90s, he toured in Europe. Then as now, the love of the fans for virtuoso piano playing sends the Gentleman of the Boogie Woogie’s career into overdrive, to international stardom.

The charismatic artist with the inexhaustible energy has recorded some ten albums where he pounds the 88 notes of his piano with a seldom seen conviction. We find ourselves transported back to the barrel houses and boogie-woogie joints of the 20s in America but with a touch of New Orleans and Kansas City. As he says: “Just give me a piano and an audience, and everybody’s gonna have some serious fun!”

You are thus invited by Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne himself; he’ll be here with his piano to meet you and launch his new CD, on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011, at 8h00 p.m, at Viree Blues Boreale, as usual in Le Petit Chicago, 50 Promenade du Portage, in the Old Hull sector.

For inquiries or interviews, please contact Alexandre Petit at: vireeblues@gmail.com. You can find further information on our guest at:

www.kennybluesboss.com or at: www.myspace.com/kennybluesbosswayne

Furthermore, you should visit our own site, which provides you with links to all of our guests sites and lots of other highly interesting information, at:

www.vireeblues.ca
www.myspace.com/vireeblues
www.facebook.com/vireebluesboreale

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