An In Depth Interview with Andrew Duncanson of the Kilborn Alley Blues Band
Nominated for a Blues Music Award in the category “Best New Artist Debut” for their 2006 Blue Bella Records release, Put It In The Alley AND nominated for a Blues Music Award in the category “Best Contemporary Blues Album” for their 2007 release, Tear Chicago Down, the music of The Kilborn Alley Blues Band has impressed countless critics and fans worldwide.
Andrew Duncanson, Joe Asselin, Chris Breen, Josh Stimmel, and Ed O’Hara are a true band, together of personal volition and sheer joy. They are already hardened players and determined innovators with deep study of the music and with a real feel for the life. The Kilborn Alley Blues Band is not a super-group; they are a true band. It is their band, and their vision.
Chicago Blues matriarch Mary Lane and her husband Jeffrey Labon fell in love with The Kilborn Alley Blues Band the first time they saw them. Mary said, “A lot of people play the blues, but The Kilborn Alley Blues Band makes me feel the blues from the time they get on the bandstand to the time they get down. They make me want to get up there and sing those blues! You meet a lot of people in a lifetime in music, and the guys in Kilborn Alley are the kind I can say I am glad to know. They have that crazy love for blues and stay true to it.”
Nick Moss, album producer and leader of his own highly respected Chicago Blues band, Nick Moss and the Flip Tops, had this to say, “The best thing they have going for them is that they have this great feel when they play together. In the Blues world, it is actually a compliment [in current lingo] when someone says you have an ‘ignorant’ sound. These guys have a real ignorant, authentic sound. They sound like the old records when they play. To me, the most endearing quality about them is that they just play for the love of the music.”
The music here is not guitar-hero, guitar-solo-driven music. In the tradition of the Chicago Blues band created by Muddy Waters, the emphasis in each song is on the ensemble. For The Kilborn Alley Blues Band, whose guitar work from Duncanson and Stimmel has always received critical praise, the point of the act is not the virtuoso solo. Duncanson and the band meld the parts into the whole to transmit that special blues experience.
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