Music lovers will be snapping their fingers and tapping their toes to the blues duo Little Joe McLerran and Robbie Mack at Frye Daze Bar and Pizzeria at 8 p.m. March 18. The show will be presented by the Black Swamp Blues Society.

The father and son with a “love and desire to carry traditional old-style blues on” is playing in Toledo for their first time before performing at the 20th annual River City Blues Festival on March 19 in Marietta.

Music runs in the family — James McLerran sings with the Toledo Opera and will be watching his brother and nephew on Friday.

“He’s so excited to have Little Joe and I come up there. He’s been down to see us perform in Columbus. Now we get to go up to his part of the world,” Mack said.

McLerran won the International Blues Challenge in 2009. The pair is based out of Tulsa, Okla., but has become international blues ambassadors. They connected with the U.S. State Department to participate in a cultural exchange program in the Middle East around this time last year.

In addition to traveling, performing and jamming with local musicians for a month in countries such as Bahrain and Kuwait, they played the first public concert in Saudi Arabia in 100 years, Mack said. Saudi bands are allowed to play at private parties, but public performances are forbidden. They performed in front of an audience of men and women, which was also unusual.

“One woman took her burka off and swung it over her head. It was like Mardi Gras,” Mack said.

Afterwards, the band went straight to the airport. The report in the news the next day said that there were only rumors that a performance took place, but Mack and McLerran laughed knowing they had it on video tape, Mack said.

“We were just so out of our element. Everything was so new and exciting,” Mack said of the whole Middle Eastern experience.

He said he was also struck by the realization that “these people are just like us.”

Next month, McLerran and Mack take off for South America to work with the State Department again on another cultural exchange.

“That’s the one thing that’s beautiful — all over the world, the music is the same essentially. I can watch guys playing at Carnival in Brazil and I might not understand the words, but I understand the music and I could play with those guys. We might have a little bit of trouble talking to each other between the tunes, but we could play music together,” Mack said.

For information, visit www.bsbs.net.

Tags: In Concert, Little Joe McLerran, Star

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Arts and Life, In Concert, Star.
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