New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 2
Facts
- Live music venues generally treat the week between Christmas and New Year's as a traditionally slow booking period outside of dedicated holiday and NYE shows, a well-documented pattern in the live music and club industry.
- Blues societies affiliated with the Blues Foundation functioned as community nonprofits that supported local working musicians through gigs and competitions alike, a structure documented in the Blues Foundation's own affiliate and IBC program materials.
This page continues the gallery for the New Year's Eve 2009 blues event begun on the previous page. Here is more on the "blues New Year's Eve" format more broadly, a tradition this journal can speak to with confidence.
A typical New Year's Eve blues club show tends to follow a familiar shape, whether it happened in Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago, or anywhere else with an active club scene: a house band or a rotating lineup of local regulars, a longer-than-usual set stretching toward midnight, a countdown moment built into the show, and then a final set or encore to carry the room into the new year. It is a format built around community and repetition rather than novelty, which is part of why these nights rarely generate press coverage even when they are well attended and well loved by the people who go every year.
For a blues society specifically, hosting this kind of night made practical sense beyond just the music. It gave the organization a reliably well-attended, feel-good event to point members toward at a time of year when touring acts and festival season were both on pause, and it gave local working musicians, the same players who might turn up at a regional IBC qualifier a few months later, a paying gig during a notoriously slow week for live music bookings generally.
The music itself at these shows tends to lean upbeat by design. Shuffle rhythms, jump blues numbers, and well-worn crowd-pleasers are more likely to fill a New Year's Eve set list than slow, downbeat blues, since the goal is to keep a room dancing toward midnight rather than reflecting quietly. Many club bands build their countdown moment around a horn-driven number or an uptempo cover rather than anything mournful, treating the arrival of midnight as its own kind of release, not unlike the way a song resolves after building tension across several verses.
The first part of this gallery is at New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 1, the gallery continues at New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 3, and the broader surviving photo index for this archive is at photos.
