Deanna Bogart Band brings blues, boogie to Cornell

MOUNT VERNON — Pianist and saxophonist Deanna Bogart brings a boogie and blues show to Cornell College on Monday, March 3.

The performance is at 8 p.m. in King Chapel. General admission is $8 at the door. This is the final concert in Cornell’s 2002-2003 Music Mondays series.

Blending 1930s boogie piano blues with the contemporary blues of New Orleans, Chicago and Memphis, Bogart delivers a high-energy, piano-pounding performance reminiscent of Marcia Ball, who packed the house during Cornell’s first Music Mondays season in 1998. Bogart’s sixth CD, “Timing Is Everything,” was released last fall.

“Her band never sounds better than when she’s venting — and she vents a lot on ‘People Can Be Just Plain Wrong,’ ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ and ‘(I’d Rather Be Sad) in Las Vegas,’ arguably the finest blues she’s ever written,” said a Washington Post review of “Timing Is Everything.”

Maryland-based Bogart won five Washington Area Music Awards — the “Wammies,” D.C.’s version of the Grammy Awards — on Feb. 9: musician of the year, songwriter of the year, song of the year (“Still the Girl in the Band,” from her latest CD), blues vocalist of the year and blues group of the year.

Bogart hit the scene more than 20 years ago with Cowboy Jazz, a group dedicated to the music of the 1940s western swing. She turned to R&B with another East Coast band, Root Boy Slim’s Capitol Offense, before forming her own band in 1988. Her current band is a well-traveled group. Bass player Eric Scott released his debut solo CD, “Let’s Hear It for the Fools,” in 2002 and a CD with the band Divine Static in 1998. Drummer Mike Aubin, who studied at Berklee College of Music and earned a degree in jazz performance from Towson State, has performed with a string of artists, including Little Feat, B.B. King, Robert Cray, Neville Brothers and James Brown. Kajun Kelley on guitar has two CDs to his credit: “StaleStories, FreshEars” and “Kajun Kelley Project – ‘Moods.'”