“Even as a teenager I was infected by the magic of a Buddy Guy, Albert King or the Vaughan Brothers,” says Kai Strauss, who grew up in Germany’s blues stronghold of Osnabrück. And he also learned early on to play the guitar like his role models. In 1995, at 25, he teamed up with Texas-born singer and blues harp player Memo Gonzalez as frontman and formed the band The Bluescasters. For 15 years they toured very successfully throughout Europe.
In 2010, Strauss became self-employed and played with the under his own name Electric Blues Allstars further. And how. Since then he has won four German Blues Awards, two first prizes from the German record critics and two BiG Awards for the best album. Above all, however, he manages to make a name for himself internationally and even in the USA, the home of the blues. Today he belongs to the small group of European blues musicians who are also credited with having their own authentic style, including by American colleagues and critics. In addition to many national and European colleagues, Strauss also performed and recorded with US stars such as Grammy-nominated Lurrie Bell, Mike Wheeler and Matthew Skoller, all representatives of Chicago blues, or with Southern blues star Tony Vega Houston and Big Daddy Wilson from North Carolina. He will soon be playing with Robert Finley.
Strauss has performed at all the major European blues festivals, including the Burghausen Jazz Week a year and a half ago. Now the 53-year-old is coming to Munich with his excellent band, in the absence of any blues club that still exists backstage He has his new, seventh album “Night Shift” with him, in which he not only enriches his global blues with grooving funk and soul elements, as usual, but also shows his development as a songwriter. His songs go beyond the usual blues lament and also take up more serious current topics, such as those disguised as a love triangle “Bad Loser”for which he was inspired by the inglorious end of the Trump administration.
So it’s no wonder that Alligator Records’ Bruce Iglauer, one of America’s blues goddesses, praised Strauss as a “sophisticated bluesman who has it all”. And that even the American living blues, the world’s premier blues magazine, has printed an extensive and laudatory review of “Night Shift”. Backstage, not only blues fans can convince themselves of the qualities of his distinctive voice, his guitar skills on the strat and the compositional finesse of his songs.
Kai Strauss & The Electric Blues Allstars, Friday, September 1st, 8 p.m., Backstage Club, Reitknechtstr. 6, www.backstage.eu