This year's Riverside Festival was an outstanding success. Musically, the highlights for me personally, as the programmer of the festival, were the Keith Waithe and Abdelkader Saadoun collaboration, the outstanding Ska Cubana with their awesome fusion of Cuban music with Jamaican ska and the funky, gospel-tinged blues of Sharrie Williams & the Wise Guys.

Sharrie and her American band gave an emotionally charged, high energy set of funky blues which got the ecstatic, packed audience dancing away from the first number. Sharrie's personality shone through and with such a tight band behind her, she had the audience eating out of her hand - no mean feat for an artist unknown to the vast majority of those present. As they say - 'Class wins out'.

Sharrie put her full, emotional self into this performance, literally crying with joy when she left the stage to rapturous applause. She is one blues diva! Watch out for Sharrie Williams & the Wise Guys in forthcoming Blues in the City seasons in 2006. She and her band are dynamite!

Paul Morgan - Riverside Festival, Nottingham.

Pool cues hung in midair as players stopped their games to check the onstage action at Buddy Guy's Legends.At the far side of the Chicago blues club, a surge of folks - some fans, some tourist, some simply curious about the sounds escaping each time the heavy glass doors swung open - found themselves packed like sardines in a standing room-only crowd.And in the middle of it all, sitting around a handful of tables, was a busload of Saginaw folks, including yours truly.Buddy Guy's served up more than ribs and spicy greens Set. 13, also on the night's menu was Sharrie Williams and her new band.OK, we know this woman is great. We know Matt Besey and James Owens are some of the best guitar players around, and that Sharrie and James have a chemistry that literally explodes when they share a stage.Keyboardist Mike Brush is the veteran of the bunch; even Buddy Guy's is old hat, a familiar haunt of his days with Larry McCray.As for bassist , Will Jackson, drummer Mark Bryant and backup singer Liz Everett, well, who can imagine what they experienced this night?But the beauty of the trip from where I sat was finding out Chicago's legendary Wabash Avenue felt the same way. The crowd screamed for "More! More! More!" So did the club securing Sharrie to a future date.Only Buddy Guy himself and B.B. King ever got this kind of response, the folks there told Sharrie it's a place where the walls hold memorabilia from greats like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and Koko Taylor.She should have felt on top of the world, but she didn't and that brought another realization, of what can happen when the stakes get high.

Sharrie called a few days after we got back, asking what I thought of her performance. That's not unusual; the guys from Verve Pipe did the same thing the other night, trying to pull reactions from me as I tried to draw out theirs. She wanted to know the particulars of the crowd - "When I'm up there, I focus on the music," she explained. "I'm not looking anywhere else."Except this night, she added she did watch the face of someone in her company who wasn't pleased with the night's performance.Completely ignorant of the power play taking place, I thought the bands casually elegant suit jackets were a classy accompaniment to Sharrie's firecracker red dress.Sharrie's self-penned "If I Could Fly Away" was a highlight of her set and when she announced, "I'm Sharrie Williams and these are the Wise Guys and we're here from Saginaw, Michigan," it sent a swell of pride through the 40 or so who made the trip down to cheer them on.It was contrary to everything the naysayers had ordered, but who is going to argue with success? Not Sharrie, for one!"I know we're going to succeed. We have faith, we have dreams and we have vision," she said.And after this trip, my vision is a little clearer, too.

From BUDDY GUY's "LEGEND" in CHICAGO by Sue White

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