JAAP REESEMA, Joanne Shaw Taylor, and Jax Hollow

I love the mission that Joanne Shaw Taylor set out on, to re-define ‘playing like a girl’, and her incredible guitar and bass skills to create her innovative blues sound. At such a young age, she’s got an incredibly distinctive mature bluesy voice, and her compositions sound as if they’ve come from someone many years her superior. The British 17 year old sings with such soul and passion, and I was incredibly excited to hear her play live.

Joanne opened the show with her song Mud Honey, before introducing herself to the audience. Half way through the track, she stopped singing and played an incredibly complicated sounding guitar solo with so much ease, that it was evident that she was a complete natural and born to be on stage. She was wonderful at interacting with her audience, and shouted out for everyone to come forward and dance along to her music, to which everyone of course obliged.

She played a great selection of her music from predominantly guitar lead tracks, to blues ballads powered by her vocals. When she played Blackest Day, everyone was cheering no end, and she got us to sing along which was a lot of fun.