by Howard Campbell
SOUTH FLORIDA – Coming off a strong 2022 North American tour, Beres Hammond looks to replicate that success with an 11-date summer trek of the United States, starting June 17 at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in Booneville, California.
On July 23, the singer is at the famed Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where he shares the bill with fellow veterans Steel Pulse and Third World.
Seven days later, Hammond and his Harmony House Band are scheduled to perform at Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Massachusetts. The tour also has stops in New Jersey, Farmingville, New York, Norfolk, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, and Orlando, Florida.
Hammond is expected to close the Forever Giving Thanks Tour with back-to-back shows at Au-Rene Theater, Broward Center For The Performing Arts on August 26 and 27.
He did consecutive nights at that venue last September and both events were sold out.
South Florida is a happy hunting ground for Hammond who began recording songs with the Zap Pow band in Jamaica during the early 1970s. Although he had solo hit songs with ballads like One Step Ahead late that decade, it was the rocking What One Dance Can Do for Fort Lauderdale’s Heavy Beat Records in 1985 that paved the way for his current status as reggae royalty.
In the 1990s, Hammond had a flurry of hit songs including Step Aside, Come Back Home, Double Trouble and Putting up Resistance. During that period, he was signed to EastWest Records, a subsidiary of Elektra Records.
