Ondine's Blues Brunch w/Ryan Lee Crosby @ Flyway Brewing

Join us for Ondine's Blues Brunch at historic at Flyway Brewing (formerly High Cotton) @ 598 Monroe in the Edge District. The featured artist for Sunday, September 28 is Ryan Lee Crosby. Cover is $5.

By his early teens, Crosby had found inspiration in great blues recordings from the likes of John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and Sonny Boy Williamson II. As he developed into a professional musician and a noted guitar instructor, a wide range of interests evolved, including punk rock and post-punk, African music, Indian classical music, songwriting, film scoring and various vital strains of the blues. Among those was the trance-inducing Hill Country blues of North Mississippi, which Crosby learned in part by traveling and performing with the late R.L. Boyce.

About 15 years ago Crosby began to study the Bentonia tradition in earnest, and in the music’s evocative minor-key laments and cyclical, often improvised structures, he found a musical space that related to and accommodated his various pursuits. Crosby saw especially direct parallels between his work in post-punk and the sound of Bentonia and the Hill Country — unique aesthetics, even within the blues genealogy. He found that all of this music shared a striking formal and emotional directness, an ability to captivate with a single mesmeric rhythmic thrust; there is also a common element of foreboding, a tinge of menace that appealed to Crosby’s earnestness as an artist.

Delta Ondine is a Memphis-based alt-blues singer-songwriter who hosts blues brunch. Ondine opens with an original alt-blues rock set at 1 pm, followed immediately by the day's featured act. Ondine works to bring in a diverse array of local and traveling artists, presenting world-class shows, in a venue that is relatively small and accessible.

See deltaondine.com, or Odine’s Instagram and Facebook pages for more information.

If you need to contact me with questions, text is probably best to 901-302-7377