Once a year the blues hounds of Iceland transform the fancy Hilton Nordica Hotel into an altar of the blues. Beer and whiskey on the bar, blues legends on the wall and the banquet hall turned into a concert venue: this is the Reykjavik Blues Festival. The frontman of it all is Halldór Bragason a.k.a. Dóri Braga, who with his Blues Club of Reykjavik organizes the whole thing. He is a noted blues performer and with his band, Vinir Dóra, has toured many of the biggest blues festivals around the globe. So if anyone knows how to hold a proper blues festival, it is him.
This year´s program had a lot to offer. First we need to mention The Blues Company, which is a blues collaboration of Magnús Eiríksson, Pálmi Gunnarsson and Kristján Kristjánsson, all legends of icelandic pop and rock history. They performed their own blues numbers and although singing mostly in Icelandic they managed to carve their way into the core of the blues. They closed this first tuesday night of the festival with their well-known-in-Iceland blues numbers like “Blues in G” and “Lucky One”.
The Wednesday night of the festival goes to the American blues star Victor Wainwright. Wainwright, who has won a lot of awards for his blues piano playing, did a two hour show for a packed hall with his guitarist Nick Black and an icelandic backing band. His show was easy going and relaxed, yet powerful, raw and really diverse. Victor played everything from slow and raw blues up to the fastest boogie woogie where Wainwright showed us what he can do with his piano and his voice. The climax came when Victor sang in the memory of Etta James her most famous song, “I´d rather go blind”. The feeling Wainwright put into the song was unbelievable. This was not a song, this was an expression, an expression from an another dimension. Wainwright was in a trance, often he didn´t sing into the mic, he forgot its existence. But that didn´t matter because his voice soared through the hall. This is something that doesn´t often happen in our times of the 3-minute popsong and it was amazing.
Thursday night, the last night of the festival, featured acts like the legend of Egill Ólafsson along with his old pals from various groups blues jamming together like in the old days. Dóri Braga´s band, Vinir Dóra also performed their 25th anniversary concert that night. Egill Ólafsson took the stage like he always does with his deep and powerful voice and his energetic performance that has characterised him. In Vinir Dóra, Guðmundur Pétursson or Gummi P, the other guitarist of Vinir Dóra and one of the best guitarplayers Iceland has given us, showed us how to play that night. Vinir Dóra played a long and good show which contained all the styles and dimensions the blues has to offer. At the end of this last night of the festival all the musicians finally gathered up on the stage and jammed a few songs. Two drummers, two bass players, four guitarplayers, harmonica, everbody pounding out the blues under thundering screams of Egill Ólafsson and Victor Wainwright. A great end to a great festival.
You can say that the Reykjavik Blues festival is some sort of an annual celebration for blues enthusiasts in Iceland. This is simply the best festival of its kind in Iceland. If you got to have some blues shoveled down your throat then you can´t miss it. This festival has pleased audiences over the last decade and hopefully it will continue to do so decades to come!
Hrafnkell Már Einarsson
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