Album Notes

Hamilton\'s premier roots and blues band TRICKBAG has just released their third CD titled TRICKNOLOGY. The much anticipated follow up to 2005\'s CACTI REDUX offers 14 original songs and a cover of DR. JOHN\'S/DOC POMUS\' \"FOOL NOBODY\". The songs are a reflection of TRICKBAG\'S various roots - Chicago Blues, New Orleans R&B, Tex-Mex, and Memphis String Band Tradition, all in a melting pot called TRICKNOLOGY. This is perhaps the truest representation of the band released on disc.

Recorded at CHATHAM GARDENS STUDIO with MIKE BERTHELMER, the album features DENIS KELDIE on organ, piano and accordion. Rounding out the keyboard department is JESSE O\'BRIEN - a TRICKBAG mainstay since the first album in \'95.


TRICKBAG is a Hamilton-based band that has been entertaining audiences on record and in concert for over a decade. Their sound is an exciting blend of blues, rock, rhythm and blues and soul music. It’s where the sultry sounds of Memphis, New Orleans and the Mississippi delta meet the gritty urban electric tones of Chicago and Detroit. And yet it’s also the sound of TRICKBAG’s “neck of the woods” as well. Hamilton has long been the center of a rockin’ blues tradition that goes back to the days of Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks.
- It might be more convenient to name the musicians that the members of TRICKBAG haven’t worked with than those with whom they have, at one time or another, crossed musical paths. TRICKBAG together and individually has shared the stage and recording studio with the likes of the King Biscuit Boy and Kelly Jay (of Crowbar), Guitar Mikey, Michael Fonfara (Downchild Blues Band),Ken Whitely, Chuck Berry, Ronnie Hawkins, Leo Sullivan and Steve McDade (the Butcher Boys’ Horns), Denis Keldie (The Lincolns, The Boomers), David Essig, Rita Chiarelli, Sonny Del Rio and Jeff Healy.
- The band’s first CD - TRICKBAG - on Peerless records received notice in publications as far flung as California’s Living Blues and the record industry bible, Billboard. Fans are looking forward to a follow up CD, now in production. Long standing favorites in their home town the group has been a popular part of community events like A Taste of Hamilton, the Hamilton Sesquicentennial celebrations, the Downtown Mustard Fest, the Burlington Rib Cook Off, the Hess Village Jazz and Blues Festival and the Festival of Friends.
Review: The new album from Trickbag finds the Hamilton, Ontario, group again bringing together diverse strands of music behind the vocals of Les Smith and Donna Panchezak.”Heart of the City” has the push pull pulse of Memphis soul; “Get there when you get there “crosses the Louisiana-Texas border, adding a taste of Tex-Mex to a zydeco rhythm;”You Better Do Right” is a backwoods duet with the feel of The Band. Several blues in the Chicago and jump styles work well, as does the splendid”I Wish I was in Heaven(With Rosetta Tharpe),”
October/November 2009 Blues Review Magazine