A VETERAN PIANIST'S BRAND NEW TAKE ON BOOGIE AND BLUES

Super fast bio version:

• Born: Spokane, Washington.
• Raised: New Orleans, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
  Based: Vancouver, British Columbia.
• Home: On the road, somewhere…

Kenny 'Blues Boss' Wayne — resplendent in a brightly colored, French custom-tailored stage suit — hammers out rockin' boogie-woogie, deeply felt blues, and puts a fresh coat of paint on good old-fashioned roots rock and roll. Now with a brand new album, An Old Rock On A Roll on the Stony Plain label, he's on the road again.

He's been a traveling musician almost all his life, playing in show bands and cover bands in his youth, seeing the world from Texas to Hawaii and from Peoria to Paris. Rediscovering his own blues roots long ago sent his career into overdrive, thanks to his fresh approach to old music, the drive and roaring good-time attitude of his live performances, and his smartly original self-penned songs. As one writer put it: "When a piano player's got the three most important things — the playing, the voice, and the look — he becomes the whole package. An artist you just have to see and hear."

Deeply influenced by Fats Domino and Johnnie Johnson, Kenny Wayne's other heroes include keyboard rockers whose names are beginning to fade into history — men such as Amos Milburn and Bill Doggett, both long overdue for rediscovery by the new generations of blues fans.

The new album has been produced by Duke Robillard, who has overseen sessions for Stony Plain by Jimmy Witherspoon, Jay McShann, Rosco Gordon, Long John Baldry, Herb Ellis, Ronnie Earl and many others. The co-founder of the band Roomful of Blues and a former member of The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robillard has more than a dozen of his own recordings on Stony Plain.

Robillard's take on Wayne? "He's a monster pianist, a soulful singer, and he captures the essence of old school blues and boogie while sounding totally fresh and contemporary," he says.

The longer bio version:

Kenneth Wayne Spruell was born in Spokane, Washington in 1944, and spent his early years in New Orleans with his Louisiana-born parents. He was eight, and already a child prodigy on piano, when he moved with his family to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles. Encouraged by his preacher father, the Reverend Matthew Spruell, to play gospel music, he was also secretly introduced to the radically more exciting boogie-woogie by an uncle.

By his early teen years, Wayne was playing dozens of gigs — including a 1962 appearance at the Alpha Bowling Club with the great Jimmy Reed. It was an infamous gig; everything Kenny's father feared about the "devil's music." A vicious brawl erupted in the crowded, smoky, alcohol-fueled club, and one man attacked another with a broken bottle, blood spraying everywhere. As Kenny recalls with a chuckle, "My dad grabbed my mom with one hand and ran up to the stage and yanked me off the piano bench and led us through the kitchen and out the back exit ... That was pretty well the end of my blues career for over 20 years."

It didn't stop his music, however. By the end of the sixties, he was on-stage with the cream of the Los Angeles soul and R&B scene — playing with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, Billy Preston, members of Sly & The Family Stone and the Doobie Brothers.

Moving to Vancouver in the early '80s — "it just seemed like home to me," Wayne says now — he soon won a strong reputation on the B.C. and Prairies club scene. His full transformation into 'Blues Boss' (his nickname came from the title of Amos Milburn's Motown comeback album) came following a 1994 tour of Europe. Kenny's longtime passion for boogie-woogie and blues paid off in the form of star treatment from piano-loving European music fans.

Three releases for the independent Canadian label Electro-Fi were all nominated for Juno Awards, Canada's equivalent of the Grammies, and his 2006 release, Let it Loose, was a Juno winner.

Now, with the release of his Duke Robillard-produced Stony Plain debut, he's already got a busy 2011 mapped out, beginning with a May trip to Paris, summer blues festivals, and a string of dates in the United States and across Canada in the Fall.

High spirited, fresh as this morning's e-mails, Kenny Wayne has earned his title, and he's having fun. "This old rock IS on a roll," he laughs. "Just give me a piano and an audience, and everybody's gonna have some serious fun!"