Performing under the simple show title ‘Blues,’ the Dana Dixon Blues Band want to be perfectly clear about what kind of music they’re performing. Looking at the band, however, you might get a slightly different impression, one that’s a little closer to the truth.
Dressed in a leopard print jacket and wide-brimmed hat, Dana Dixon plays the harmonica and sings lead vocals for her four piece band. Along with a bassist, guitarist, and drummer, the foursome goes through an assortment of songs falling in the rather narrow range between blues and 50’s rock n roll.
Truly, the music played by the Dana Dixon Blues Band is best described as rockabilly, similar in style to music made popular by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. The guitar work is very impressive, and unmistakably blues, but the rhythms and bass lines are much faster and more prominent than you would expect from straight blues music. With the exception of a couple of slower numbers, most of the set has that swinging, peppy rhythm, with an emphasis on off-beats, that made rock-n-roll so popular at its inception.
There is nothing wrong with the music played, in fact it’s quite good. The guitar fits very well with the rhythm section, although the guitarist’s solos are sometimes noticeably long. It just seems like there is a case of mistaken identity in the group. For a band with ‘Blues’ in its name as well as its show’s name, there are surprisingly few songs which could be classified as blues and not more accurately as rockabilly, rock n roll, or country. Dixon’s vocals, which are mostly lost in the sound mix, further betray the band’s genre by holding a bit of a country twang.
Blues has become such a foundational element of popular music that it’s sometimes hard to say whether or not something is or isn’t blues. This show references that musical past, and utilises it heavily, but uses it to play a different kind of music; just like many artists before them. One would like to see that style flaunted a bit more, instead of their efforts to advertise a band they are not.
