There’s nothing out of the ordinary about a band doing a string of local dates to celebrate the release of an album. It is unusual when the album is nearly two years old and the band has to fly in from France for the shows.
For Cincinnati’s Boogie Woogie Blues piano master Ricky Nye, it’s turning out exactly the way he envisioned it, if slightly after the fact.
“You can’t have a CD release party if the band’s not there,” Nye says with a laugh over drinks at Gaslight Cafe in Pleasant Ridge. “It would be different if I was purely a solo act, but I operate with a band here. And it’s no disrespect for the guys I play with here to bring these guys over.”
The CD in question, Ville du Bois, began in the spring of 2008 while Nye was in Paris on one of his semi-annual European treks. Nye — former Raisins keyboardist Rick Neiheisel, to fans of a certain age — had booked a string of Parisian dates with a massively talented trio of musicians he'd met three years earlier through pianist Julien Brunetand, a friend and veteran of Nye’s annual Piano Summits, who occasionally used the threesome as his own backing band.
Their string of shows starts Thursday and the Blue Wisp Jazz Club and continues on Friday at the Rabbit Hash General Store, Saturday at Chez Nora and Sunday at Maifest (3 p.m.). Get show details and read Brian Baker's full interview with Nye here.
