Downchild Blues Band Live Bloor Street, TD Jazz Festival, Saturday June 22, 2019


2019.6.22 (2)

Downchild Blues Band with guests -  Saturday, June 22, 2019. TD Jazz Festival, Bloor Street, Toronto.

A few casualties of the road later, Donnie “Mr. Downchild” Walsh’s Downchild Blues Band had made it to their 50th Anniversary in road-worthy form. The band are touring Canada on and off for the rest of the year, raising the stakes for this particular gig. Luckily, it fell on a sunny Saturday evening, the first of the summer.
Downchild’s rocking blues with a dash of soul might be more famous globally for inspiring The Blues Brothers, but they’ve been a reliable ticket to a party in Canada for, (ahem) 50 years. Like their more famous musical forebears, each lost a charismatic front man to lifestyle problems, but Downchild soldiers on.
Tonight’s bash was a free street show for thousands of people crammed into the concrete canyon of Bloor West at Bay Street. A few friends came by, like American keyboardist Gene Taylor, guitarist Kenny Neal, and Icelandic blues guitarist Erja Lyytinen to fill out the busy stage.
Closer to home, they played “It’s a Matter of Time” with Montreal hoser blues rocker David Wilcox. The opener of 1977’s “We Deliver” l.p. begs for slide guitar, and Wilcox didn’t disappoint. Paul Shaffer and Dan Aykroyd joined in the fun as well.   
Aykroyd sauntered out to play “Born in Chicago,” made famous by Paul Butterfield. Naturally, “Soul Man” was on Aykroyd’s shortlist and he sang it with Donnie Walsh and Shaffer, which got a bit cumbersome.
Paul Shaffer hollered “Happy birthday, Downchild Blues Band; 50 years later!” before the band, with the evening’s various guests, jumped into their finale, “Flip Flop Fly,” turned into a local hit by Downchild in 1974 on their second album “Straight Up.” The show ran about 90 minutes, and fell safely within Toronto’s strict, stifling noise curfew laws.



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