//July 3rd, 2008

JUST ANNOUNCED, ANOTHER AWARD NOMINATION: The significant new weekly blues e-zine THE BLUES BLAST announced on July 2nd that Kilborn Alley Blues Band has been nominated for its first annual "Best Blues Band" award. THE BLUES BLAST has put forward nominees in eight categories. Other nominees in the "Best Blues Band" category are Kilborn Alley's Blue Bella label mates, Nick Moss and the Flip Tops, plus Bryan Lee and the Blues Power Band, Magic Slim and the Tear Drops, and Back Door Slam from the UK. The awards will be based on fan voting, which begins on the IllinoisBlues.com website on July 14th.

THE JULY TOUR is about to begin! July will take the Kilborn Alley Blues Band to Ohio and then to New England with shows in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Just typing that sentence is a geography lesson. The tour culminates in playing the 26th Annual Bucks County R&B Picnic in Levittown on July 19th. But the emotional peak of the tour may be playing in harmonica player Joe Asselin's home town of York, Maine. This should be one hell of a home coming for Joe. And when the band gets home they make a long swing to St. Louis, south western Wisconsin, and Omaha-- and just a few days later are off to Cincinnati and Louisville. Details are on the "shows" page of this site.

RUF RECORDS in cooperation with BLUES REVUE is planning to release an anthology of contemporary blues songs that take on the progressive political issues of these times and are planning to include "Soldier Blues" from PUT IT IN THE ALLEY (Blue Bella 2006). We will release more information on this cd as it becomes available.

LOOKING BACK, May was an incredible month. Getting up at the crack of dawn to play live on television. The BMA's in Tunica. Ground Zero in Clarksdale. Sitting on the curb eating craw dad in Rosedale. Stevie Ray's and Buddy Guy's again. New friends and old. June had its moment too.

WON OUR THIRD STRAIGHT C-U MUSIC AWARD Thursday, April 3rd, there was a big show at The High Dive in Champaign, where they gave out the Fourth Annual Champaign-Urbana Music Awards. Everybody's got to be from somewhere, and we are from this amazing "Big Ten" university town, home of the main campus of the University of Illinois. Certain things get done world class in our home town, and there is not a lot of wild applause for mediocrity around here. So, youth culture mecca that it is, we've got a thriving, and sometimes wonderful and even important music scene. The "important" part of the equation is fragile, but you get the idea. These awards are sponsored by radio WPGU-FM and Buzz-- which is the arts & entertainment weekly of the Daily Illini. So we won best Jazz/Blues band in 2006 and again in 2007, but it all seemed a little off because almost all the other nominees were jazz groups. This year the category was just "Blues," and the nominees were our good friends, the guys who lent us many a hand in starting out, in some ways our respected "elders" (notice we put that in quotes so nobody can say we said they are old) and admired good examples-- Candy Foster and the Shades of Blue Band, Bruiser Rumenie's band The Impalas, the Delta Kings, and Billy Galt's Blues Deacons. Now this is a popularity contest worth being in! So, we were pleased to win, and would the nominators please stop nominating us!

HOUSE OF BLUES RADIO HOUR. So we are tough guys, not affected at all by empty stuff like celebrity. Hollywood. Yawn. So, why were we so tickled to hear ourselves discussed, our song played, the same song made into the theme of a hilarious extro narrated by none other than Elwood Blues over yet another of our songs, on the "House of Blues Radio Hour"? What a trip!

RUNNERS-UP to KOKO TAYLOR! Thanks to your generous support, Kilborn
Alley's Tear Chicago Down was the runner-up to Koko Taylor's Old School
in the Bluescritic.com reader's ballot for "Best Contemporary Blues
Album" of 2007. This is a tremendous honor, and we appreciate your
votes.

GO TO YOU TUBE (TM), search for Kilborn Alley, and see what comes up. Here is what we think you will find: an amazing mini-documentary that ran repeatedly beginning in 2006 as a part of WILL-TV's "Prairie Fire" series. Built around footage shot at the Shades of Blue music festival on 8 July 2005, and subsequent interviews, this is a treat. Next, you will find some live performances taped at The Iron Post in Urbana, Illinois on 11 January 2008. You'll see some smokin' hot play there.

CHECK THE SHOWS PAGE, and just check back often to see what we're doing!

DID YOU KNOW, or maybe you knew and forgot, Kilborn Alley Blues Band has a distribution agreement with Burnside Distribution Corporation of Portland, Oregon? What this means is, when you are looking for the two Blue Bella releases, TEAR CHICAGO DOWN and PUT IT IN THE ALLEY, have your local records store contact BDC about getting the cds.

DON'T FORGET, while this site changes slowly, the Kilborn Alley Blues Band Myspace page changes almost daily, at least in some small way-- and additions to the performance schedule get posted there fastest. Check it out at: myspace.com/thekilbornalleybluesband

. . . it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a
saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little
corner of the high mansions of the sky.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)