Bonamassa explains the origin of the sprawling tribute, saying, 'It was brought to my attention... that B.B. King would be turning 100... and nobody was planning on doing much. I said we need to do something.'
When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname "The Boogie Cat" or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. He'd lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family's farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother's gospel singing.
Referring to Franklin as "music royalty," Lagasse welcomed the singer to his show for a birthday dinner of fried oysters with horseradish cream, tomato and sweet corn relish, grilled veal chops with herbed cheese, wild mushrooms in Bordelaise sauce, and prosciutto-wrapped asparagus. Needless to say, Franklin was quite impressed with the beautiful meal, even asking Lagasse between bites, "Did I hear you were single?"
At the turn of the 1960s, when free jazz was making its initial seismic impact, multi-instrumentalist Phil Cohran-he later added the name Kelan-was living in Chicago and playing trumpet for Sun Ra's Arkestra. He contributed to crucial recordings by the band during his tenure, including We Travel the Space Ways, but Cohran was a restless autodidact who never stuck with any one project for long.