The Chris Duarte Group has been retooled with Jeff Reilly on drums and Joseph Patrick Moore on bass, both from Atlanta, Georgia. Their first gig was June 22nd at the Bradfordville Blues Club in Tallahassee, Florida.
Recorded at Sun Prairie Studios, April, 2007, in Cotati, California.
Blue Velocity, is a record which aptly showcases many sides of this brilliant artist in the context of high energy blues-rock with moments that bring to mind legendary artists as diverse as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Johnson. Duarte has made the kind of guitar-driven blues record that fans have been waiting for.
The eagerly awaited new album by the Chris Duarte Group is now available. It was released on July 31st on Blues Bureau International, a subsidiary of Shrapnel Records. It clocks in at 74 minutes and the sound mix is wonderful with nice clean, crunchy guitar tones. Chris Duarte's vocals have never sounded better. This album was the swan song for band members Dustin Sargent and Damien Lewis who left the group shortly after this album was recorded in April of this year. I like this album, it grows on you. It will be interesting to see how well it does with Shrapnel Records behind it. I think it will turn on a whole new bunch of fans who may have never heard of the Chris Duarte Group before. I hope it gets radio airplay with Shrapnel perhaps opening some doors that Chris's previous label did not. Some songs will sound "hauntingly familiar" to longtime fans and I am curious to hear what y'all think. Keep in mind that Chris Duarte is one link in a long chain of great blues musicians and part of that blues tradition is interpreting and reinterpreting songs from others, as well as your own material. Some songs have riffs that will be familiar to stuff you've heard before by both Chris and others preceding him, just like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton did with some of their songs. He has also recorded a couple of tunes that he has wrote and performed with the Japanese band Bluestone.
