Wodonga’s Festival of the Blues has got Mark Lizotte excited.
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It’s not only the genre that interests him, it’s also the pub venue – Edwards Tavern.
“I enjoy the mix, whether it’s playing to crowds of 60 to 6000 to 60,000 , it’s a different dynamic and a different challenge,” Lizotte says.
And playing a blues festival is not really a challenge for Lizotte, despite cutting his teeth in the pub rock circuit, which launched Johnny Diesel and the Injectors and a career in rock.
“Blues has been there all along, even when I wasn’t aware of it,” he says.
“I grew up listening to it in the house. My dad (Henry Lizotte) played sax and loved the heady jazz, the blues kind of jazz. He listened to musicians like Cannonball Adderley, Bill Doggett and all the great jazz pianists – Count Basie and Duke Ellington – Dexter Gordon was his favourite sax player.
“I’m lucky because I never felt like I had to rebel against the music in my house.”
Lizotte recalls his father saying “I don’t really like this band, but I like their sax player (Bobby Keys)” while the pair were listening to the Rolling Stones 1981 album Tattoo You.
I’m lucky because I never felt like I had to rebel against the music in my house
- Mark Lizotte
“They do the blues really well,” Lizotte says of the Rolling Stones.
“In some of their tracks they really mastered that American black blues sound, you couldn’t guess they were a bunch of skinny, white English guys.”
Lizotte draws on that life surrounded by blues and jazz in his live performances.
In 1996 he released a blues album Short Cool Ones with Chris Wilson and was the first out his hand up to record blues flavoured acoustic tracks as part of the Liberation Blue Acoustic series about a decade ago.
He will serve up plenty of that for fans at the Border Festival of the Blues.
“Those Liberation sessions turned out to be a really durable thing, I toured from that playing a lot of blues festivals,” he says.
“I have a lot of songs where the compass is pointing to the blues so I tend to go towards that repertoire, then I might throw in Muddy Waters.
“A few years ago at a show I did a Diesel song then a Muddy Waters, back and forwards all night.
“I draw on Howlin’ Wolf and my work with Chris Wilson, he’s an incredible harmonica player.”
The two-day festival also features Chain, Phil Manning, Chris Wilson Band, Fiona Boyes Trio, Lloyd Spiegel, Chris Finnen, Dreamboogie and more.
