The History of the name "Deja Blooze"

In the summer of 2007, I was looking to put a blues duo together with a guitar player and singer I had met at a local jam night at the Smilin' Dog Restaurant. We got together a couple of times and played some old blues numbers to get a feel for how we fit together. This fellow was renting a little cabin on the water at Possession Beach on the south end of Whidbey Island, and one night we were just talking about the effect blues music had on us and I commented that the old Delta blues gave me the deja-vu's...kind of like the deja-blues. I immediately liked the sound of the two words together and the play on Deja Vu. There was also the connotation of revisiting something that one may have previously experienced.

Unfortunately, the fellow couldn't find work on the island and he and his wife packed up a week after our last get together and moved back to New England. I had just found a like-minded aficionado of the blues, a guy who could both play and sing the blues and just like that he was gone. I was back where I had started, but the name Deja Blues came out of brief friendship.
It seemed to summarize how I felt about blues music...my deep connection with the basic forms of the music style and the heartfelt experiences captured in the song lyrics of the old blues pioneers from the Mississippi Delta region. The more I sat with the name the more connected I felt to it and then I decided to play further with the name and changed 'blues' to 'blooze'. It made the name unusual yet musically recognizable so that the name identified the style of music I wanted to play. The name stuck with me and I kept it on the back burner until a short while later I found another guitar player to team up with. As soon as that pairing jelled, I brought out the name Deja Blooze and in November of 2007 my original blues duo made its first public appearance at a now defunct coffee shop in Clinton, Washington. The duo became a trio a year later when we added a bass player.

In the Fall of 2009, that original trio dissolved and once again I endeavored to reform the Deja Blooze experience.  After playing several gigs as a solo act, I enlisted an occassional sit-in artist--Dave Gignac on harp--to join me.  We subsequently added Russell on bass and most recently Scott on drums.  Deja Blooze continues today as a "blues experiment" whether I'm working as a solo act or with other configuarations of the band, always exploring the possibilities that this original American genre has to offer.