Chiarelli Brews Intoxicating Canadian Blues

Harry Manx and his transcendental blues are still a warm buzz in my head. Last Saturday night is a blues blur. And blues has moved into my front row favourite kind of music. I know it can't last. But I just can't leave without a blues encore. It's time to sit around and peel the labels from old soldiers.

It is amazing to me that Canada has brewed so much good blues. Even better than beer, this Canadian export is just cause for national pride.  It has a taste of its own. It's unique. And it's especially potent.

Rita Chiarelli is a case in point. She will appear with Manx at a concert in Kitimat on February 22. Shelagh Rogers, CBC's radio talk show maven, has called Chiarelli "The goddess of Canadian blues."  Blues Revue Magazine (Sept. 01) trumpets her "soul-searing voice and tough, occasionally tender approach" to original blues tunes. And there is a flat load of them!

Chiarelli has composed words and lyrics to practically every song that appears on her four CD compilation. There's "What A Night-Live," "Just Gettin' Started," "Road Rockets," and my favourite, "Breakfast at Midnight."

Rita's style is a chill, bone-grinding, opposite to Manx's warm, eastern, love-and-peace mysticism. On "Breakfast at Midnight" Rita is down, gritty and totally original. Her songs are sensual and deal with traditional blues themes. There's the spurned love of Woman in Blue.  There's that muddy-water, Mississippi Delta, sound of Memphis Has Got the Blues. These tunes focus on lost love of one kind or another and feminism be damned! They are the keening, wailing, shrill songs of a heart-broken woman whose man has done her wrong.

On any given, dark, Canadian, winter's night, Chiarelli will play your emotions like a fine-tuned fiddle. It's a talent she shares with other exceptional Canadian blues artists

There are a host of blues "soldiers" atop Canadian music's rail fence.  There's the long necks and stubbies, the East and West and prairie preferreds.  Just don't go throwin' any rocks at them! These artists stand with the world's best.