Kent Burnside Blues Band

Kent Burnside Blues Band plays Dazzle on Thursday, October 15, starting at 6 PM. It's a full band set: Kent Burnside on guitar and vocals, Colin Best, Jacob Best, and Gabe Meyer. They're playing in a blues format, and the whole thing is built around the legacy Kent carries from his grandfather.

That grandfather was R.L. Burnside, the legendary North Mississippi hill country bluesman. Kent was born in 1971 in Memphis and spent his early years in Holly Springs, Mississippi, as R.L.'s eldest grandson and one of his closest pupils. He first heard the blues watching his grandfather play for locals on the family farm, where he used to sell sandwiches to the audience for a dollar a piece. It's a small detail that puts the whole thing in perspective: he grew up with the music as a backdrop to daily life, not as something he discovered later in a record store.

There's a specific lesson from those years that still shapes how he plays. R.L. taught him that to be a bluesman you have to find your own rhythm on the guitar, because you cannot play someone else's rhythm: rhythm comes from your heart. That's the core of the hill country style—hypnotic, rhythmic, and deeply personal rather than following a strict set of chords. The band carries that legacy forward, keeping the focus on the rhythm and the feeling rather than just the notes.

If you're into the blues, this is a direct line back to one of the genre's most distinct traditions. The show is at Dazzle, 1080 14th Street in Denver, on Thursday, October 15, at 6 PM.