Music / Nightlife

If you love Chicago blues, you are no stranger to B.B. King’s “Sweet Little Angel” and Muddy Waters’ “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.”

But did you know that these songs, popularized as electric blues in the ’50s, go back to the acoustic ’30s?

Harmonica professor Mark Hummel does, and he’s prepared some soulful lesson plans on the subject for his annual Blues Harmonica Blowout, which hits Jazz Alley next week.

Roy Hargrove (Jeremy Goodwin)

The “ jazz” in Jazz Alley has become rare enough that when a for-real jazzer hits the stage, it’s definitely time to jump. Trumpeter/fluegelhornist Roy Hargrove (shown here) fits that bill.

Effervescent New York chanteuse Karrin Allyson opened a four-night stand to a full house at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley Thursday in a relaxed, bluesy mood, mixing crowd favorites with some stimulating new material.

(Gary Tinnes)

Sara Gazarek, an emotive, crisply swinging vocalist who graduated from Roosevelt High School in 2000, is in town next week for her first full-length engagement at Jazz Alley. She is thrilled about playing Seattle’s most prestigious jazz house, but a performance in May at the Blue Note, in New York, had an even deeper resonance.

Sad to report that the great jazz trumpet player Dave Douglas has cancelled his summer tour due to illness. Douglas was scheduled to play at Jazz Alley Tuesday and Wednesday, June 10-11. Management reports that the dates will probably be rescheduled for later this summer or fall. Get well, Dave!  

There was a time when Jazz Alley would have been laughed out of town for booking smooth jazz titan Kenny G, but that was before the number of jazz musicians who could fill this A-list club shrank so drastically that it had to embrace soul, smooth and world music acts just to survive.

When I heard that my favorite jazz vocalist Karrin Allyson — at Jazz Alley Thursday through Sunday, Oct. 3-6 — was making a Christmas album, I thought, “Oh, no, her record label asked her to do this.” Dead wrong, on all counts. “I’ve always wanted to do a holiday CD,” Allyson said in a phone interview last weekend from the Jersey…