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Blues, jazz, heart songs, tunes old and new, deep and wide like a big river rolling thru the dry land, winding it's way across time and space...traditional sounds revitalized, re-interpreted, re-organized, re-newed....

The Mississippi Sheiks becoming Melbourne's New Sheiks..... swingin' along on a train from the old southern state of Alabamy to the bars of Fitzroy and Brunswick all through the working week...and then comes a' Sunday from Duke with sanctified feeling and soulful yearnings on a fiddle filled with feeling played by a gal from the western plains way across that lazy river...

I hear the bowed strings of the big old bass a talkin' to me by the man who leads the band...

I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade into the big parade....the sounds of the New Orleans' glorious New World past echoing down the street in east Brunswick and oh...all my love in vain.... The age old cry ....the fundamental things apply ....as time goes by..... and a plaintive creole fiddle tune, a deep African blues from the kid with the horn a'busking at Circular Quay now a playin' in the minor key for you and me ..... if the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck sang Sleepy John from Brownsville, Texas stompin his foot and makin' everybody cry and laugh now a late night west Melb barroom holler from a new southern queen of the blues.... A stomp, a dance, a ritual of notes, a piano pounding and a drummer sounding out a 'we can do anything' tempo....

The New Sheiks....new music, new variations on the themes of an old, old troubled world....a world that can still lift itself up off the floor and dance .... A voice down here in Melbourne town that defiantly cries out .... Listen to this....too good to miss... Andrew Baylor, East Brunswick, February 2012.