Get Your Blues on this Sunday

How I might have gotten to the Blues
Walter “Wale” Liniger, 2010

"I grew up with trains in my life: my grand-father and my father both were railroad engineers, driving trains for the Swiss railroad system. Our lives were ruled by train whistles and the odd hours of father’s work. As we didn’t have a car, connections with other people always seemed to start and end at a train station; that is where we said “hello” and “good-bye.”
Blues is a story of amorphous content. I believe that most of us will experience moments of the blues, and yet we find ourselves quite often at a loss when invited to explain. Music and other artistic expressions help us give voice to such moments. "The blues are not about anything new. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard,” wrote James Baldwin.

In my life the blues are always connected to trains, and vice versa. Trains carried me to the warmth of my grandmother’s kitchen and her stories, trains took my father’s time and mind. Trains are about arriving and leaving. Needless to say that when I heard my first old time blues-music, my body felt the underlying train rhythms and recognized that “huge something” that couldn’t be stopped. But my heart also embraced the emotions that rode on the whistles, boisterous in the day and lonesome at night.

Eventually life brought me to Mississippi and South Carolina where I hardly found any similarities with the tightly-stitched Swiss system I knew so well. Most of “my teachers of the blues” did not know where Switzerland was, and I had no clue how to deal with a mule. Trains once again connected our stories. Whilst their whistles sound very differently, trains on either side of the Atlantic are metaphors for motion, and with it metaphors for coming and going, for gain and loss.

I never became a railroad engineer, it required too much diligence, too much adherence to regulations. However, the young boy’s dream is still with me: it lives in my story’s breath and beat!" --Wale Liniger
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Blues Professor Wale Liniger
Take a unique journey into the blues with a Swiss-born artist who has made this distinctly American sound his own, weaving harmonica, guitar and voice into a rich musical tapestry. A celebrated artist featured in blues festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, this professor is a true believer in the creativity of the human mind when the heart is in trouble.

Sunday, Feb 28
6:00-7:30pm
Lobby
FREE!!!

This performance is sponsored by The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).
http://www.bluesprof.com/

Click the link below to watch a video of Blues Professor Wale Liniger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YkVE0q0ocE