Danny Zelisko Presents will welcome the legendary singer/songwriter/guitarist Boz Scaggs to the historic Celebrity Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, October 22. Every ticket purchased includes, one (1) download of Boz Scaggs’ forthcoming album, Out Of The Blues. Special guest comedian and valley favorite Mark Cordes opens the show. Tickets go on sale Friday, June 8.
It’s been a life of music – five decades in the case of Boz Scaggs, and spread far and wide with remarkable range in style and influence. From his early West Coast rock and soul bands, through his smooth ’70s Hollywood years with hits like “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle,” to his more recent explorations in R&B, jazz and the Great American Songbook, Scaggs has created a highly personal, unfailingly soulful repertoire. His latest edition, Out of the Blues, set for release on July 27 on Concord Records, finds Scaggs reconnecting with his earliest musical loves.
This album marks the final piece of an unofficial trilogy for Scaggs, which began with the Steve Jordan-produced albums Memphis and A Fool to Care. Born in Ohio and raised in Texas and Oklahoma, Scaggs explains “I’m a child of the ’50s, and grew up on the music of my parents’ generation – the post war swingers, the Hit Parade era, the semi-classical Gershwin albums and the American songbook of show and film music. Then came early rock radio; with Elvis, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, the high-watt late night radio out of Nashville and Chicago and doo-wop out of the East Coast. All the same stars that dotted the musical heaven our generation grew up under. Particular to my coming of age in the Southwest was hearing that crazy stuff out of south Texas and Louisiana. It was something different from that which my fellow teenyboppers in other areas were hearing. These albums, to some degree, are an exploration of those early influences, tracked through different periods of my experience.”
The self-produced Out of the Blues has Scaggs applying his iconic voice and gritty guitar skills to a set of vintage classics by such blues greats as Bobby “Blue” Bland, Jimmy Reed and Magic Sam, and an unexpected and stirring reading of Neil Young’s “On the Beach.” It also features four songs written or co-written by Scaggs’ longtime friend and kindred musical spirit Jack Walroth, a left-of-center bluesman who Scaggs met in the ’60s, when both lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and who relocated to San Francisco at around the same time as Scaggs.
For the occasion, Scaggs assembled a star-studded studio band including such prestigious players as guitarists Doyle Bramhall II, Ray Parker Jr. and Charlie Sexton, bassist Willie Weeks, drummer Jim Keltner and keyboardist Jim Cox, as well as Boz himself on guitar, bass and vocoder, and Walroth on harmonica.
Scaggs is currently in the midst of a personal musical renaissance. Liberated from the old-school album/tour cycle, he’s worked on his own terms this decade to create a series of eclectic, highly personal recordings that showcase his mastery of multiple musical genres, including the jazz standards collections But Beautiful and Speak Low, which topped the Billboard Jazz charts, the soul-inflected Memphis and the bluesy A Fool to Care, each hitting #1 on Billboard‘s Blues charts.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Reserved tickets ($35, $65, $70 and $85) go on sale at 10 a.m. on Friday, June 15 at CelebrityTheatre.com and Celebrity Theatre’s box office, 440 N. 32nd St., in Phoenix. To order by phone, call 602.267.1600. All tickets are subject to facility and ticketing fees. All ages welcome.
