MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica – Chicago-born Grammy- award-winning blues singer, Koko Taylor, has been added to the January 24-27, 2008 line-up of the annual Air Jamaica Jazz & Blues Festival.
Known worldwide as The Queen Of The Blues, Taylor was born and raised on a sharecropper’s farm just outside of Memphis and began singing in church as a child. At 18, Taylor moved to Chicago. While working as a domestic on Chicago’s ritzy North Shore by day, she began to sit in with the various blues bands across the city’s South Side at night. The great producer/songwriter Willie Dixon heard Koko singing with Howlin’ Wolf’s band one night and quickly secured a contract with Chess Records for her, where she scored a million-selling hit with Wang Dang Doodle.
Over the course of her nine Alligator albums, Taylor has won every award the blues world has to offer, including eight Grammy Award nominations. She won a Grammy Award in 1984 for her participation in the compilation album Blues Explosion. Taylor has performed for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and appeared on television and in movies countless times.
On her recent album, ‘Old School,’ Taylor returns to the sounds of the 1950s electric blues she heard when first arriving in Chicago on a Greyhound bus from Memphis. With five original compositions (more than she has written on any previous recording) and singular reinterpretations of songs she carefully chose, Old School has been hailed as the best album of her entire career.
Koko Taylor
Taylor will replace Taj Mahal on the Saturday January 26, 2008 line-up that is already receiving rave reviews from fans and resulting in tickets for the festival and airlines as well as hotel rooms becoming hot selling commodities.
Others on the star-studded line-up include legendary singer, Diana Ross; eight-time Grammy Award winner, Anita Baker, revered ‘Caribbean Queen’ singer, Billy Ocean, Grammy winner Jill Scott, newcomer Ryan Shaw, Spyro Gyra, Lou Gramm of Foreigner, Yerba Buena, pianist Marjorie Whylie, JT Taylor, Kool & the Gang’s former ” Legendary Voice,” Jessica Yap; AJ Brown, Dwight Stephenson and 13- year-old powerhouse Nikki.
Tickets to the festival are still available at the event’s home page: http://www.airjamaicajazzandblues.com/08/.
But the executive producer is reminding fans that tickets will only be sold for a limited time to the January 24-26, 2008 event and is urging all to ensure they snap up tickets now.
Meanwhile, many hotels in the Montego Bay area have already sold-out, but fans can still book rooms for the Caribbean’s biggest party this month.
