Regional IBC, November 2009: Part 2

This page is an archival placeholder for the second part of a photo gallery that the original Southern California Blues Society site published after a Regional International Blues Challenge (IBC) qualifying round held in November 2009. The old scbsevents.org site is gone, and no independent web archive of these specific gallery pages has surfaced during our research, so we are not able to reproduce captions, set lists, or scoring details from that night. What we can do, in the spirit of an honest fan journal rather than a pretend continuation of the original site, is explain what this kind of event actually was and why it mattered to the local scene.

The International Blues Challenge is the Blues Foundation's annual band competition, culminating each year in Memphis, Tennessee, centered on Beale Street. Acts cannot enter the IBC directly; they have to be sponsored by a Blues Foundation-affiliated blues society, which runs its own local or regional qualifying round first. The Southern California Blues Society was one of those affiliates, and a November 2009 "Regional IBC" round, like the one this gallery apparently documented, would have been exactly that kind of local qualifier: unsigned or semi-pro bands playing short sets in front of judges, competing for the chance to represent the region in Memphis the following January.

The judging format itself is well documented by the Blues Foundation and is worth explaining here, since it is the one part of this story we can state with confidence. Panels of three judges, drawn from blues professionals and dedicated fans, score each act on a ten-point scale across five categories: Blues Content, Originality, Vocals, Instrumental Talent, and Stage Presence. Blues Content and Originality reward a band's grounding in blues tradition balanced against fresh material or arrangements; Vocals and Instrumental Talent assess technical and expressive performance; Stage Presence covers how an act commands and connects with a room. Those categories would have applied to whatever bands played this November 2009 round, even though we cannot name them.

If you came here looking for the specific bands, scores, or the eventual regional representative from this round, we genuinely do not have that information, and we would rather say so than invent it. The first part of this gallery may have covered the earlier heats of the same event; the following year's round is covered at Regional IBC, November 2010. What photographic material survives from this kind of SCBS gallery, if any, is collected on our photos page as an archive index rather than a reconstructed event record.