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To find it, one had to probably already know last weekend's second annual Granville Blues and Jazz Festival was in the windowed, white tent behind the Olive Garden in the 8600 block of W. Brown Deer Road. No signs pointed to its presence, but the half-circle of food trucks nearby signaled something was up if the strains of music didn't.
The greater draw of the two-day affair was arguably Sunday's bill, headlined by the local blues pros who have made it to Minneapolis specialist label Blind Pig Records' roster, Altered Five. Saturday's lower-key lineup wasn't absent of charms, however, among them the opportunity to judge different acts' performance of the same songs.
Another delight lied in celebrating Joe Jordan's birthday with him. The fusion jazz/adult R&B crooner displayed just how spry and youthful 62 can be as he fronted his Soul Trio for the first of two engagements that day. For this one he brought along Milwaukee saxophone mainstay Warren Wiegratz for assistance on his signature instrument, flute and occasional background vocals. To highlight the talents of that special guest—who also shares membership with Jordan in the Milwaukee Bucks' house band Streetlife—each of Jordan's two sets led off with an instrumental allowing Wiegratz to stretch out in solo mode before relegating himself to an ensemble position.
Wiegratz provided the quintet their blues quotient with growling, dexterous runs on his sax, but Jordan brought the smoothness of 1970's-'00's R&B. Jordan led his accompanists, whose other most notable asset is a bassist given to slapping his axe's strings in a funkified manner, in mostly mid-tempo repertoire, the pulse of which well suited the group leading a mostly ladies line dance to Frankie Beverly and Maze's "Joy & Pain" and filling the asphalt at the lip of the stage even more with revelers for Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." A downward turn in the beats allowed Jordan to ply his vocal gift to John Legend's "Ordinary People" and Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine."
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The lead singer of the band that followed Jordan, Tonight Only, sort of apologized for having at that Withers song, too, but they probably needn't have. They encouraged the crowd to sing along to its barrage of “I knows” and bested the two acts that bookended their festival performance by playing through what would have been their break. Actively acknowledging and encouraging the trickle of pre-teens who came forward to bust moves to their tunes, sometimes with adult guardians in tow, also put them in their audience's good graces. Though Tonight Only were something of a last-minute addition to the lineup, put on the bill only three weeks prior after another act had to cancel, they acclimated well to the event's aesthetic. Their spin on "Born Under a Bad Sign" owed at least as much to Albert King's original as Cream's remake. Shuffling rhythms supplanted the reggae syncopation in their interpretations of Eric Clapton's "I Shot The Sheriff" and Sugar Ray's "Fly," and they segued in medley fashion from Tom Petty's "Breakdown" to Ray Charles' "Hit The Road Jack."
The Chicago five-piece NuBlu Band did take a breather between their two closing sets but had other ways of endearing themselves to their listeners. Alongside singer Kenyatta Gaines, guitarist Mark Maddox made himself a center of attention off the platform, taking a couple of occasions to play his borderline metallic shredding and riffs to the back of the tent.
As their name intimates, NuBlu aren't strictly a blues group. A couple of their finest moments came when they turned to stepping, the classy couples dancing made famous in their hometown, which the band facilitated with their takes on Maze's "Before I Let Go" and KEM's "Find Your Way (Back In My Life)." Maddox accented the latter with a smidgen of The Isley Brothers' take on Seals & Croft's "Summer Breeze."
When they did break into blues, though, they broke hard. Their apex in the genre could have been a run through Buddy Guy's "Midnight Train," featuring one of Maddox's runs through the mostly seated crowd. What that song and the rest of NuBlu didn't feature that night was the vocal presence of usual lead singer and daughter of Buddy Guy, Carlise Guy. Her Saturday night absence went unexplained, though she was promised to be on the bill the next afternoon when NuBlu was scheduled to precede Altered Five.
