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  • Blues and Joys

    ROOTSY026

    Artist: Sivert Bramstedt

    Label: Rootsy

    I was born in Sweden in 1956. Picked up my father's old guitar and tried to learn how to play when I was 11 years old. Learning mostly from records. In my midteens I started freelance-writing about music for various magazines and newspapers. Around 1977 I discovered that I could scrape a living performing the kind of music that I had loved since I was a kid.

    The first six years I sang for the cinema-queues on the streets of Paris. Pretty cold during the winters but the money was often really good. I busked all over Europe down to North Africa and spent some time in New York City.

    Moved back to Sweden, raised a little family and all of a sudden got lots of gigs, playing festivals, clubs, pubs, radio, TV, concerts, crummy joints and other unlikely places all over Scandinavia. I made a few recordings, movie-soundtracks and the odd tour of Europe.

    A couple of divorces, illnesses, recovery, poverty and lots of good times later I was put in the studio to make this CD. It´ s a sort of a document of things that I have picked up along this over 30 year journey. Mostly I stick to my free interpretations of the blues. But while recording live in the studio a few other things slipped in there too; an African piece that sounds a bit like Mississippi John Hurt, a couple of improvised instrumentals, jazz tunes, and all kinds of music are related anyway.