A top-class double bill. It is, of course, not always easy to programme a festival evening that is both practical as regards logistics and varied from the audience’s point of view. In the case of our Blues and Roots double bill of John Hiatt and Robert Cray the decision was easy. We snapped them up straight away since the brilliant songwriter and inspired bluesman had already spent the entire summer on the road together in the USA. Each of them had an exciting new album too: Hiatt with “Beneath This Gruff Exterior”, on which he continued his longstanding collaboration with guitarist extraordinaire Sonny Landreth, and Cray with “Time Will Tell”, perhaps the musically most daring and versatile album in his career, which spanned over 20 years.

Martin Schäfer

Albert Collins, B.B. King, Dr. John, Koko Taylor, Junior Wells, Luther Allison, Marla Glen, The Blues Brothers Band, Nina Simone, Buddy Guy und Etta James were the blues-names during the first 14 years of our festival’s history. Difficult negotiations bore fruit: power blues and charming soul were bound to happen when the Robert Cray Band, which had last performed at the St. Jakob’s stadium in Basel, played at the comparatively intimate Messe Basel in 1999.  

More than a supporting act was Olu Dara, the Montreux-Blues discovery of the year 1999.