New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 3

This page closes out the archival placeholder for the three-part New Year's Eve 2009 blues gallery from the original SCBS site. We still cannot tell you the venue, the bands, or the crowd for this specific night, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the keyword this page was built around, jump blues bands in California, points to something genuinely real and well worth explaining: jump blues has deep, verifiable Southern California roots, and it is entirely plausible that a California blues society's New Year's Eve show in 2009 would have leaned on that tradition, even if we cannot confirm which specific band carried it that night.

Jump blues emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s as a high-energy, horn-driven, danceable cousin of big-band swing and traditional blues, popularized nationally by artists like Louis Jordan and Louis Prima. Los Angeles was one of the genre's major West Coast homes: electric guitarist and bandleader T-Bone Walker, a central figure in the development of postwar electric blues, was based in Los Angeles through the 1940s, and the city's Central Avenue jazz and blues club scene of that era helped shape the jump blues and early rhythm-and-blues sound that fed directly into what later became rock and roll. That lineage did not disappear; it has persisted for decades in California blues and swing-revival bands that specialize in jump blues as a live dance-club style, which is exactly the kind of band a New Year's Eve blues party would book for a room that wants to dance at midnight.

That history is also why the 2009 Long Beach Blues Festival lineup covered elsewhere in this archive makes sense as a companion event: it included Flattop Tom and His Jump Cats, a band explicitly built around the jump blues style, on its opening night that same September. It is entirely possible, though unverified, that a SCBS New Year's Eve show a few months later drew on the same local pool of jump-blues-leaning bands that played the festival circuit, since that was the kind of act the Southern California scene had in steady supply.

We want to be clear about where the real history ends and the specific, undocumented night begins. The jump blues genre and its California roots are well established; the particular bands, venue, and photos from this SCBS New Year's Eve 2009 gallery are not. The previous part of this gallery is at New Year's Eve Blues Celebration 2009: Part 2, the surviving photo index for this archive is at photos, and for an earlier regional qualifying round from the same organization, see Regional IBC, November 2008.