Blind Boy Paxton returns to New Zealand this April.
Blind Boy Paxton is a modern day songster, minstrel and bluesman. His name is Jerron (say Jer-Ron as in Geronimo) but you call him Blind Boy. Blind Boy Paxton is the living embodiment of the true blues in the twenty-first century, but plays it all in the true songster tradition: ragtime, hokum, old time, French reels, Appalachian mountain music, blues and lots more. He can mesmerise audiences with his humour and story-telling.
The multi faceted, physically gigantic, three hundred pound, legally blind, orthodox Jew is only in his late twenties but has earned a reputation for transporting audiences back to the 1920s and making them wish they could stay. He sings and plays the banjo, guitar, piano, fiddle, harmonica, Cajun accordion, and the bones. He has the eerie ability to transform traditional jazz, blues, folk, and country into the here and now, and make it real.
Jerron says “Believe me, the blues is not some half-dead thing hooked up to a respirator. It’s as relevant now as it ever was. Hip Hop is just a newer form of my people’s expression, and the blues is an older one. Ain’t nothing new under the sun. The roots of the tree don’t cast no shadow, but they hold up everything above.”
Blind Boy Paxton will also play at Blue Smoke in Christchurch on 5 April.
