Caught: The Third Annual Guitar Women Concert Edmonton Oct. 5, 2007

If your favourite word is "beautiful" or "talented" or"redhairedwoman" then maybe you should have seen this. Then again, maybe not. Problem is, those are "icing" words. My favourite word is a "cake" word--- "dedication". Sue Foley is all about being the cake and not just the icing, and it was Sue Foley's dedication that shone through everything on Friday evening, as Edmonton's blues community gathered at the Myer Horowitz Theatre to take in her "Guitar Women" tour. Her dedication to the great women blues guitarists and singers who came before her, like her idol Memphis Minnie. And her dedication to the great young Canadian talents showcased on this tour--Quebec's Roxanne Potvin, Manitoba's Romi Mayes and BC's Rachelle Van Zanten.

As expected, the concert featured Sue Foley's choice blues guitar solos and the stellar slide playing of Calgary-based Ellen McIlwaine and (especially)Van Zanten. But this wasn't an electric "we can rock with the best of the boys" rave-up. It was an all-acoustic set that also contained a number of pleasant surprises.

One was the amount of original material. "Roots" was an important part of what was going on here, as it is in almost any acoustic blues concert, but at least three-quarters of the material that these women were playing were their own original compositions. It is clear that for these women the blues is not, as it is so often perceived, an artefact of 1930s and 1940s Mississippi or 1950s Chicago. The blues is dynamic and flexible, and still likely to be the most essential ingredient in almost any hybrid contemporary music. As a Jimi Hendrix devotee (for Hendrix, the blues was a multicultural and space-age medium), I was pleased to read that McIlwaine had been friends with Hendrix in his 1966 Greenwich Village days, in the year before he exploded onto the London scene. Her cover of "May This Be Love" (one of the ballads from Are You Experienced?) was true to his spirit as well as to her own. She spent most of her childhood in Japan, where she attended the Canadian Academy in Kobe. Part of her distinctive sound comes from the influence of Japanese classical and folk music. She actually tunes her guitar to get the classical Japanese sound for her takes on Hendrix, Albert King, and Al Green. Wild! Her latest CD, Mystic Bridge, is all about her revisiting her eastern roots, and it features a Fijian-born Canadian tabla palyer named Cassius Khan, who was trained in Indian classical music, and a sax player named Linsey Wellman, whom McIlwaine describes as "playing like John Coltrane goes to Egypt".

Sue Foley was no less adventurous. She has been studying Spanish flamenco music, and her new tune "Blue Farukka" explores some of the common elements of blues and flamenco music while showing off her newfound guitar technique. I wasn't expecting that!

Another aspect of this concert was its strong sense of purpose. The Guitar Women Silent Auction sold a guitar and art pieces and numerous photos and paintings to raise money for Rachelle van Zanten's project the Rocker Girl Camp ,for girls age 10-17 "who want to rock". The women also donated 10% of their proceeds from CDS and merchandise for this cause.

The event was recorded for CKUA and the estimable Holger Peterson was on hand to emcee the proceedings. If you missed the concert, try to catch the radio broadcast. It might just be your piece of cake.