The Big Easy: Spell It Out.

The Big Easy and Michelle Brown play the 11th Annual Brisbane Blues Festival at the Waterloo Hotel on Saturday.

Party Time every time The Big Easy and Michelle Brown work a venue. As they hit boiling point or simmer the brew the combo keeps fanning the flames under the ultimate New Orleans music stew.

High on the 88s is Al Hensley with a powerful blues vocal range. Swingin’ off the bass is Tad ‘Gravelmouth’ Graham with soulful vocal abilities. King of the kit is drummer Jim Toomey and there’s Blues Mama Michelle Brown who knows how to let out a delta-ish growl on cue.

“It’s an adrenaline rush all the way you know,” says Al. “Every gig is played like our last gig whether we’re played to 3 people or 300 hundred. The Big Easy is a name that means New Orleans, like New York is called the Big Apple. We draw our influences from the vibrant rhythms of New Orleans, that great amalgamation of music, all the blues and jazz and latin rhythms and everything that comes out of the City.”

An interest in community radio initially drew The Big Easy Trio together Al explains: “Noosa Community radio started up in the mid-nineties and received the attention of a lot of musically minded people and as a matter of fact the 3 of us guys in the Big Easy all became members of the station. We all started doing radio shows on community radio; we found we had similar musical tastes. We were asked to do a fundraising evening, one night. We didn’t even rehearse we jest all knew the songs that we wanted to do, all bluesy sort of things.”

“Somebody heard us by the name of Barry Charles who was quite a legend in Noosa and Barry was looking for a new band at the time and he thought we were just the band to back him. We had already been established but we joined up with Barry and suddenly we were working three and four nights a week with Barry Charles. Barry was the main singer we didn’t sing at all we just enjoyed that,” says Al.

“After a couple of years Barry decided to go overseas and we felt that we weren’t recognised as a Trio as singers in our own right so we needed to have someone to replace Barry and someone put us on to Michelle Brown who was looking for someone to join up with herself at the time. Michelle Brown came and tried out a couple of songs with us at a gig one day and she just fitted so perfectly with our music and we enjoyed her singing it was very different from Barry and so we hooked up with Michelle.”

“Michelle brought us more into focus as singers as well as herself. She knew we were good singers and she got us to sing some songs as well as her. So we have this Michelle Brown out front and pretty ballsy voices with the bass player and with myself in the rhythm section behind her and its reached a point now that we have to diversify to cover all bases. We have become quite popular.”

The Big Easy featuring Michelle Brown have also spent rewarding time in the studio. Their 1998 album, I Put A Spell On You includes the Ausmusic award winning original Mother Funk and Hensley reveals how this opportunity became a career highlight: “Well APRA had this song writing competition and we were recording the CD at that time and Michelle said, ‘oh Al there’s this thing we should send Mother Funk down for you know, you guys wrote it, why don’t we just send it down you know it came out pretty good’, we thought why not, we sent it away and blow me down the thing got up and won the Jazz/blues category of that year. It got us a little bit of an airplay on that.”

Prior to The Big Easy connection Hensley, Graham, Toomey and Brown have solid performance backgrounds when you consider dynamic diva Michelle Brown had a musical partnership with Sunshine Coast’s singer/songwriter and guitar man Peter Steel. He introduced Michelle to the Blues. Tad Graham is a true lover of celtic, rock, jazz r&b and blues and Valentina is his solo recording effort. Jim Toomey is originally from the UK and he’s played and recorded in many formations. Hanging out with Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart during their Tourist band days would have to be a memorable experience. Al Hensley an excellent music director kicked around with 70’s rock band Nivada before getting caught up with the Union Blues Band in the eighties and even made a concert appearance with the Legendary Mr Bo Diddley.