Fri 2/28 @ 8PM
Chicago blues band Mississippi Heat has an odd history. It wasn’t formed by an old 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.
The harmonica-playing bandleader and songwriter with the distinctly un-bluesy name of Pierre Lacocque moved to Chicago with his family as a teenager and started to steep himself in the city’s blues traditions, while attending the city’s tony University of Chicago Lab School. He had already turned onto black American music in via his radio back in Brussels, or as he puts it in his fascinating and well-worth-reading bio, began to “unravel the subtle auditory endowments of Destiny.”
Destiny took a little while to find him. In the meantime, he earned a doctorate at Northwestern University and become a clinical psychologist. Destiny finally arrived in 1991 when he formed Mississippi Heat, which echoes the big electric blues that exploded in that city in the ’50s and ’60s.
It features singer Inetta Visor, an authentic Chicago south sider who has a great wallop of a blues voice; another Chicago native, drummer Kenny Smith, whose father drummed for Muddy Waters for 30 years; and bassist Brian Quinn from Athens, Ohio who attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. They’re a cultural mix, to say the least.
Mississippi Heat has now made ten albums (it’s working on its eleventh) and racked up a long list of appearances at major blues festival, both in the U.S. and Europe.
Now they’ll be coming to northeast Ohio as part of the Conservancy of Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Heritage Series at Happy Days Lodge.
Tickets are $17 the general public, $12 for conservancy members, $5 for kids ages 3-12.
conservancyforcvnp.org/Mississippi-Heat