Nick Moss & The Flip Tops May 21, 2009

A musician of consummate skill, Nick fully understands the debt he owes his predecessors and how important it is to carry on tradition in an honorable fashion. “I’m not trying to re-invent the wheel,” he says with characteristic modesty, “or trying to bring things into the new millennia. I’m just playing what was handed down to me and do it justice. I have a lot of respect for the guys who taught it to me—I played with Jimmy Dawkins, I played with Willie Smith, I played with Jimmy Rogers—and in my heart I love [this music] and I don’t feel it has to be changed much.”

Passionate blues fans around the country gravitate to Nick’s playing in live performance and on recordings because of that stylistic link to the Chicago blues past. But Nick’s music also holds enormous appeal for casual fans of blues and even novices. “I’m trying to find that fine line of not compromising the integrity of that classic music,” he says, “and yet still make it a little fresher-sounding and contemporary-sounding where I can get across to the element of the crowd that isn’t hard-core.”