Saturday April 4 * doors at 6:30, music at 7 * $15-20

Photo by Michael Kurgansky

Ryan Lee Crosby is currently based in Rhode Island, but his musical heart is in Mississippi. He has released numerous albums, toured internationally and is a leading practitioner of the Bentonia School of rural Delta blues, as well as a world music explorer. Smithsonian Magazine praised his ability to "bring influences from Africa and India to the Bentonia sound." Blending reverence for tradition with a modern, trance-inducing approach, Crosby's process is informed by diverse influences that include Indian raga, ambient music, and post-punk. For Crosby, all these seemingly disparate threads weave together through the meditative power of the blues.

Crosby's new album "At the Blue Front" (featuring Grammy nominated bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes) offers a haunting, hypnotic meld of Bentonia and Hill Country blues. Recorded on reel to reel tape over two afternoons at Holmes’ iconic Mississippi juke joint, the album was produced, recorded and mixed by Crosby, with a selection of original compositions, traditional repertoire and fully improvised songs.

Dr. Jake Hertzog is a multi-genre award-winning guitarist and composer, whose career to-date has spanned jazz, rock and classical new music styles. He has toured throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and India and performed and recorded with a diverse cadre of artists including Randy Brecker, Ivan Neville, Mike Clarke, Blondie Chaplin, Anton Fig, Corey Glover, Barry Altschul, Dave Leibman, Ingrid Jensen and many others. He is a grand prize winner of the Montreux Jazz Guitar Competition and holds music degrees from the Berklee College of Music and The Manhattan School of Music in New York.
Growing up in the Annapolis area and attending University of Maryland with friend and labelmate Robbie Basho, Max Ochs contributed two tracks for the 1967 "Contemporary Guitar" on John Fahey’s Takoma label. Inspired by his friend Fahey, Ochs developed his own interest in fingerstyle guitar, learning from one of the masters, Mississippi John Hurt, during a one-month residency in Ochs’ New York apartment when Hurt reappeared on the folk scene in 1964. Ochs was also performing with the legendary band, Seventh Sons, founded by Greenwich Village mainstay and early folk innovator Buzzy Linhart. Seventh Sons were a massively popular NYC band during the years of 1962-1964, recording tracks for Capitol Records for their debut record, which was scrapped after Ochs left the band and New York. Ochs has continued recording and performing in his spare time, releasing music on the Fonotone and Tompkins Square labels, and with collaborators like Neil Harpe and Rugburn.