Kleinmond is not necessarily a town you would expect to experience soul-wrenching, spine tingling blues music, but for the weekend of the 4th and 5th of March it felt like the perfect place to be. Being at the Big Blues festival felt like stumbling into your local children’s playground (not something I regularly do – for the record), and discovering it full of olympic athletes, having a lekker jol and tumble around. Imagine this experienced through a gentle bourbon haze, and instead of all the performers being sexy because of their overdeveloped physiques, their actual souls are sexy because they are channeling blues so raw and powerful it blows your mind.
Before I get onto the music, let’s cover the basics: food and drink are plentiful, with a very high ratio of braaivleis to other forms of cuisine. Aside from the required beers, some very tasty organic-sustainable-eco-enviro-friendly cider and wines were flowing as well. The porta-loos were probably the best of any music festival I have ever been to which was a huge bonus when I found myself somewhat unsteady on my feet later on down the line. If at any stage things got too hot and sweaty one could just run about 500 metres to the (achingly cold) sea to cool off. Perfect. Now on to the important stuff.
The atmosphere was gentle and relaxed in the day time, and gradually built up to feverish and hip grinding in the evening (I take this on faith, as I of course had passed out from over indulgence of bourbon by approximately 8pm). Saturday contained a mouth watering array of South Africa’s finest blues musicians. Gerald Clark brought his fiery afro on to stage and set the tone with his deep and dirty delta blues. You could literally feel both men and women re-evaluating their judgements of gingers and it wouldn’t surprise me if there are no single gingers in the entire Western Cape the next time you look.
Dave Ferguson followed afterwards with his funky microphone skills and trademark tight white t-shirt, but I must say the musical highlight for me came with the legendary Albert Frost. Watching that man wield an electric guitar from 5 metres away borders on a spiritual experience. I say musical highlight, because another kind of highlight came whilst having a beer with Albert Frost and Gerald Clark in the balmy afternoon, when Albert signed my girlfriend’s left breast. Anytime, Albert.
It was a male dominated event, as most blues events are, with all the big boys: The Boulevard Blues, Blues Broers, Dan Patlansky and of course the biggest of them all, harmonica wizard Rob “˜Big Bob’ Nagel. It was then with perhaps more intrigue than usual that I lapped up the sultry Natasha Meister. She’s a dark and beautiful twenty year old princess of the blues, with a voice like Amy Winehouse and fingers that know their way intimately around a fret board. I could go on. In fact I think I almost did run on stage naked at some point during her set – held back only by Misters Frost, Clark and Nagel who were intent on keeping her out of harm’s way. Well they won’t be there next time Natasha but something tells me you can handle yourself just fine.
So it was with a dazed but peaceful expression that I stumbled from my sleeping quarters on Sunday morning, smelled the cool, Kleinmond sea air, and knew that this had been a thoroughly worthwhile weekend. I can’t wait for the next Big Blues festival, and in fact I won’t – I’m going to start stalking all of the aforementioned artists on Facebook right now!
