Karl Henry Mann - 5-6:30pm

At the start of the 1990’s he moved from Rochester to Dallas and found himself jamming alongside monster players like Mike Morgan, Tyrone Starks, Buddy Miles, and Sam Meyers. He co-founded Blue Lisa and The Howling Dogs, a critically-acclaimed and painfully unsigned Dallas-based blues band that was a regular in the Texas clubs. When the band broke up he moved north and spent the next 10 years in Alaska, hosting a Thursday-night blues jam and playing the rough-and-tumble bars and festivals across the last frontier. Alaska, as it turns out, is critical to the story: It was here that he learned to play the lap steel by translating the licks he’d learned from Robert Johnson and early Muddy Waters records. He was a regular guest on Amy Van Singel’s Atomic Mama radio hour (the same Atomic Mama that founded Living Blues Magazine, interviewed Jimmy Reed and crashed on Muddy Water’s floor).

In 2005 he moved to Europe and shortly after arriving earned the coveted gig to open for Fleetwood Mac’s founder Peter Green at the Orkney Islands Blues Festival. He became a favorite at the blues clubs and bars across the UK that had nurtured the original blues revival in the 1960’s- places like the Crawdaddy, Redcar and the Red Lion. He spent the next ten years headlining major music festivals all over Europe and the US, including the Orkney Blues Festival (UK), Gaastroblues (Hungary), Augustibluus (Estonia) and Burnley Mechanics (UK), Blues on the Green (US) and the Ft. Worth Blues Festival (US). He’s won a couple Aberdeen Music awards as best live act, won reader polls in Alaska and even won two prestigious British Blues Awards for his lap-style guitar playing.

Now back in Rochester – we welcome Karl to the B-Side stage.