Fri 2/20 @ 8PM
Chicago blues band Mississippi Heat is deceptive on the surface. They’re not from Mississippi and the band wasn’t started by an old black bluesman who came up from the delta to Chicago during the Great Migration — or the son of someone who did — but rather, someone who migrated from Brussels, Belgian.
Band leader, songwriter and harmonica player Pierre Lacocque moved to Chicago with his family as a teenager. Like an earlier generation of middle-class white boys in Chicago like Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield and Harvey Goldberg, he started to steep himself in the city’s blues traditions.
After earning a doctorate at Northwestern University and becoming a clinical psychologist, the lure of the blues became too powerful to resist and he formed Mississippi Heat in 1991, to play the big, throbbing electric blues that came out of Chicago in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
The band’s fronted by singer Inetta Visor, a native of Chicago’s south side who has a one of those great big blues voices. It also includes two veterans of Chicago’s blues scene, guitarist Michael Dotson and drummer Kenny Smith, plus bassist Brian Quinn from Athens, Ohio who attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. They’re quite a mix of backgrounds.
The group released its 11th album Warning Shot last year, while continuing its busy schedule of blues festival appearances in both the U.S. and Europe. It was a year ago — before that album’s release — that they played in northeast Ohio at Happy Days Lodge as part of the Conservancy of Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Heritage Series. Now they’re back at the same venue and ready to share these new tunes.
Tickets are $17, $12 for conservancy members, $5 for kids 3-12
conservancyforcvnp.org/events/concerts
Photo by Daniel Brunner
Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Peninsula, OH 44264