Vince Dean & The Baroque Blues Band

My Grandmother bought me a used guitar, complete with case and a copy of Bert Weedon's "Play in a Day" from a second-hand shop in Fulwell, Sunderland - it was 1959 - a very hot summer like 1976 and 2026.Initially obsessed with Elvis Presley, The Shadows, The Beatles and Bob Dylan, I ended up, as so many of us did in the 1960's, hooked by, what we called 'Rhythm & Blues' - the music of John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Lightnin' Hopkins, heading backwards towards Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake and the like. It was folk-blues that reeled me in during my mid-teens. The British guitarist Davy Graham stood out for me, his music augmented by folk-influenced originals like Nic Jones and The Incredible String Band. Mostly acoustic and mostly finger-style players. Although no stranger to the Telecaster and ES330, acoustic music usually dominates, as I reach for the J45 nine times out of ten.I am not a good guitar player, lacking consistency, making mistakes, wayward timing and a flat tuneless voice that can't be improved upon, even by the wonders of today's musical technology. Writing is what I do, an indulgent, isolationist, lyrical activity, composing only small music to frame the words. In my head a modicum of orchestration maybe, here and there a bit, baroque in the sense of 'ornate' but quite limited really, as blues music tends to rely on three chords, or does mostly.Poetry and obsession with the written word led to songwriting in early teens. After a while, my Fidelity reel-to-reel tape recorder had me lending 'albums' I'd made to friends, as you couldn't make decent copies in those days. Eventually the purchase of an Akai 4000DS Mk II allowed for 'sound-on-sound' recording in mono, with each overdubbed track diminishing the higher frequencies. That said, with an Akai 4000 you could make reasonable quality cassette copies from your 7.5 inches per second reel 'master'. So friends and colleagues could suffer the indignity of having to make polite and likely disingenuous endorsements of my musical ramblings.As affordable technology developed, 4-track cassette recorders came in and then gave way to digital 8-track machines. This machine-based technology evolved into the Apple Macintosh computer-based GarageBand and its big brother for the professional (!) - LOGIC Pro, and how marvellous it has been for us writers and musicians.Despite these advances in technology, everything I produced sounded amateurish. The first Baroque Blues album is probably the only exception but even that CD is plagued with various technical shortcomings and reverberation issues.Although this amateurish stigmata has plagued previous recordings, I am pleased to declare that The Baroque Blues Band's new album 'Drop Down Blues' is, for the first time, wholly untypical. Twelve predominantly folk-blues songs recorded in Logic Pro - no mistakes, in tune, in time, well balanced having been mixed and mastered by an outside facility - and finally an album that sounds radio-ready, because, after all these many years, it is...

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The Baroque Blues Band

The first iteration of the BBB was formed in 2003 to 2006 resulting in two albums. Their first release in 2004 was untitled. Much later saw the release of The 2nd Guitar Concerto in B# - a cobbled together mixture of recordings from this period with the original sound recording being released in 2013, the highlight being Amanda's version of Moon River with Tom on lead guitar. There are guest appearances from vocalists Cassie Solon Parry, Irene Rae and Tessa Bennie. John Pini features on electric guitar. The songs are written by Ian Stokes and/or Vince Dean apart from Moon River (Mancini & Mercer) and Police Dog Blues (Blind Blake)

2nd Guitar Concerto In B#

The Baroque Blues Band

The Baroque Blues Band