2025 Event Headliner
Chicago-based blues singer, songwriter & guitarist
Biography Excerpt by Thom Jurek
Chicago-based guitarist and singer/songwriter Joanna Connor is a virtuoso stylist in modern electric blues, R&B, and blues-rock. Her take-no-prisoners playing style joins fiery single-string runs to dazzling, rough-and-ready slide guitar pyrotechnics in an approach at once incendiary and deeply soulful.
Connor is also an accomplished vocalist and songwriter. Despite situating her blues approach firmly in the Chicago tradition, Connor is well-versed in the genre’s long history and has shown herself to be a master of soulful blues-funk.
Tani Diakite & the Afrofunkstars
From Mali to Madison, a local favorite shares rich musical heritage
When you hear the blues played by Tani Diakite and the Afrofunkstars, you’ll understand why it is often said that Mali is the birthplace of the blues. The Kamale N’goni is one of several Arican instruments that preceded the banjo, so you’ll hear similarities to bluegrass music as well. The interplay between Kamale N’goni and jembe grooves so hard that audiences can’t stay still – the urge to get up and move is too powerful!
The Kamale N’goni instrument originates from Wasulu, near the border of Mali and Guinea, West Africa. This instrument is derived from the larger Donso N’goni, which means “hunter’s harp”.
Throughout the centuries, Malian hunters were also skilled musicians who used their trance-like music to appease the spirits of the animals they hunted, so as not to be plagued by evil spirits. The Kamale N’goni is a smaller, more popular version of this instrument. It is the centerpiece of a popular style of music from Mali called Wasulu Music.
A two-time MAMA Award Winner
BRC: Jazz Blues with a Groove
Founded in 2014, the Bill Roberts Combo brings a tight, nuanced, and rhythmically powerful presentation to blues-jazz unlike anything you’ve heard before. The Bill Roberts Combo plays many top venues in Madison and the upper Midwest. BRC delivers grace, subtlety, power and passion in their unique and mesmerizing take on the jazz-blues tradition every time they take the stage.