One of the foremost electric blues harpists of the modern era, this Grammy Award winning musician is best known for his harmonica work on the Rolling Stones hit single, “Miss You”.

"...an extravagantly lyrical harmonica player"
- New York Times

"Sugar Blue is going to be a superstar"
- Village Voice

Grammy Award-winning harmonica virtuoso Sugar Blue is not your typical bluesman...
Born James Whiting - he was raised in Harlem, New York, where his mother was a singer and dancer at the fabled Apollo Theatre. He spent his childhood among the musicians and show people who knew his mother, including the great Billie Holiday, and decided that he wanted to be a performer.

Blue received his first harmonica from his aunt, and proceeded to hone his chops by wailing along with Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder songs on the radio,   he was soon to be influenced by the jazz greats such as Dexter Gordon and Lester Young.
Sugar Blue has used this background to his advantage, though, creating an ultra-modern blues style and sound that is instantly recognizable as his own.

Blue began his career as a street musician and made his first recordings in 1975 with legendary blues figures Brownie McGhee and Roosevelt Sykes . The following year, he contributed to recordings by Victoria Spivey and Johnny Shines before pulling up stakes and moving to Paris on the advice of pioneer blues pianist Memphis Slim .

While in France, Blue hooked up with members of the Rolling Stones , who instantly fell in love with his sound. The Stones invited Blue to join them in the studio. Besides his work on the Some Girls album, he can be heard on Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You . He appeared live with the group on numerous occasions and was offered the session spot indefinitely, but he turned it down, opting instead to return to the States and put his own band together rather than became a full-time sideman. Before returning to the U.S. in 1982, Blue cut a pair of albums, Crossroads and From Paris to Chicago.

Blue's decision to return home, despite his growing renown as a session player, was spurred by his desire to work with and learn from the masters of blues harmonica. Thus he came to Chicago and proceeded to sit in with the likes of Big Walter Horton , Carey Bell , James Cotton and Junior Wells . Blue went on to spend two years touring with his friend and mentor Willie Dixon as part of the Chicago Blues All Stars before putting his own band together in 1983. With his own band, Blue's star continued to rise. He received the 1985 Grammy Awardfor his work on the Atlantic album, Blues Explosion, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
He recorded on Dixon's Grammy-winning Hidden Charms album in 1989, has performed on festival stages with classic artists like Muddy Waters, B.B. King , Art Blakey and Lionel Hampton and has also set his sights on television and the big screen. He sat in with Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Jerry Lee Lewis for the Cinemax special, Fats Domino and Friends, and has appeared on screen and in the musical score of Alan Parker's acclaimed 1987 thriller Angel Heart, starring Robert De Niro.
Blue has played and recorded with musicians ranging from Willie Dixon to Stan Getz to Frank Zappa to Johnny Shines to Bob Dylan , he is perhaps best known for his signature riff and solo on the Rolling Stones' hit Miss You from their Some Girls album. Blue performs his own version of the song on his 1993 Alligator debut BLUE BLAZES.   With his second release IN YOUR EYES Sugar Blue emerges as a singular, profound songwriter as well as a harmonica wizard.
 
He has appeared across America, Europe and Africa at many prestigious festivals - Chicago, Zurich, Den Haag, Antibes, Nice, Cannes, Montreal, Pistoia, Bern, Rapperswil,... Blue continues to appear in clubs and festivals around the world.

Sugar Blue incorporates what he has learned into his visionary and singular style, technically dazzling yet wholly soulful. He bends, shakes, spills flurries of notes with simultaneous precision and abandon, combining dazzling technique with smoldering expressiveness and gives off enough energy to light up several city square blocks... And sings too! His distinctive throat tends to be overlooked   in the face of his instrumental virtuosity - he's got a rich, sensual voice with a whisper of huskiness which by itself would be something out of the ordinary.
But oh, there's that harmonica again... !!

When he debuted with GOLDDIGGER in 1998, much of the blues world was already familiar with Ronnie Baker Brooks via his long apprenticeship as bandleader for living legend patriarch, Lonnie Brooks. His primal effort helped him earn a WC Handy Award nomination for "Best New Blues Artist" and enough encouragement from fans and media to light the runway for takeoff of a successful solo career.

Ronnie's second cd, TAKE ME WITCHA, was released in 2001.  By now, he was creating a major stir among the music community as a new kind of blues songsmith. He was writing scintillatingly youthful and urban compositions framed with pyrotechnic guitar work and the unbridled energy of a band more akin to rock and roll than anything else.

His career since has successfully navigated a path through the heaving landscape of independent music marketing, revealing how today's talented artist can achieve unprecedented self-determination in their careers with hard work, intelligent marketing and grass roots loyalty.

The four years spent carefully cultivating his latest recordings have paid great dividends with THE TORCH, the epitome of a courageous and genre-bending release.  Heart and soul are laid bare on track after track as bridges are built between more traditional concepts of blues music and modern freedoms of expression.   

An apt analogy, "THE TORCH" symbolizes Ronnie Baker Brook's role in the evolution of contemporary blues. A legacy steeped in the Chicago music tradition, he is ignited by passion for the family craft and fuelled by the responsibility of being crowned steward of the form by some of its most venerable masters. Ronnie bears the flame of a generations-old muse to an ever-widening modern audience. 

"You won't hear me singing songs about working in the fields or trying to move up from out of the Delta, because those aren't my experiences…" Ronnie says, "but you will hear songs about growing up on the south side of Chicago and the things you see in the ghetto as a kid. They're different experiences, so I might sing about them a different way, but it's still the blues."

THE TORCH metaphor applies as easily to the incendiary Ronnie Baker Brooks stage show that has been scorching festival stages and steaming up tavern windows from coast to coast. Ronnie fans the flames of three young journeymen in Daryl Coutts (keys, organ) Maurice Taylor (drums) and Carlton Armstrong (bass), bringing to life an interplay of fiery elements greater than the sum of its parts and more accurately contained than controlled.

Made up entirely of original material, most of the new songs were recorded in Memphis with the same Chicago-based ensemble that has backed Ronnie on the road these past several years.  Several others were recorded in Minneapolis where Ronnie enlisted members of another band that knows well how to keep up with a funky frontman, Chance Howard and Michael Bland of Prince's New Power Generation. 

On the title track, Ronnie is encouraged to "Carry on!" by a most unique and impressive collaboration of special-guest endorsees, including father Lonnie Brooks, Grammy-winner Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater, Jimmy Johnson, and singing on his last known recording project, the late Willie Kent.

Indulging his appetite for hip-hop, THE TORCH pairs Ronnie Baker Brooks with rapper AlCapone for the radio ready "If it Don't Make Dollars, it Don't Make Sense", a shared mantra adopted to cope with the business side of making music.

Throughout THE TORCH, the veteran ear of co-producer Jellybean Johnson (Janet Jackson, The Time) helps Ronnie capture the best aural treatments for his songs with a progressive mix that emphasizes composition over instrumentation, and he contributes impressive fretwork and vocals on a few songs, as well.  Other guest appearances include renowned bluesman JW Williams, siren-esque Stephanie Bolton, Acme Horns and accomplished studio-percussionist John Shouloudis.

Like Golddigger and Take Me Witcha before, Ronnie Baker Brook's newest offering courageously explores a wide dynamic range, from frivolous to ferocious.  But something in the applied maturity of THE TORCH gives it a depth of texture that truly sets it apart as a coming-of-age piece.