Bluesy rocker will play the Castle Theater… with orchestra!

Coming straight from the Hawai‘i Romance Festival on O‘ahu, bluesy rocker Boz Scaggs will perform at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s Castle Theater on Monday, May 12, at 7:30 p.m. Scaggs will be accompanied by the 30-piece Mat Catingub Orchestra for an evening full of rhythm and romance on Maui.

Scaggs attracts long-lived fans across the music spectrum. The singer, songwriter and guitarist grew up in Texas, influenced by the rhythm and blues, soul music, rock ‘n’ roll and Delta blues he heard coming over the radio airwaves from as far away as Nashville. In high school, he played in a band with classmate Steve Miller before striking out on his own. He spent a couple of years in Europe, then headed to San Francisco (via a roundabout route through India and Nepal), where he joined the Steve Miller Blues Band and took part in the famous Bay Area music scene.

Scaggs’ first self-titled solo album was cut for Atlantic Records, then he made a string of records (Moments, Boz Scaggs & Band, My Time) under the Columbia label that explored his love for rhythm and blues music, culminating in the soulful Slow Dancer, followed by the commercial and artistic success of Silk Degrees. Scaggs made a few more albums, then took a hiatus from the road.

In the early ’90s, he signed with Virgin Records and made four albums, including the Grammy-nominated blues collection Come On Home and the critically-acclaimed Dig. On his own Gray Cat label, Scaggs has released Greatest Hits Live, a two-disc live collection that spans his entire career, and But Beautiful, in which he tackles the Great American Songbook accompanied by a jazz quartet. “It opened up a whole new set of challenges for me,” he says. Critics thought that Scaggs rose to the challenge and he was lauded by both Jazz Times and Rolling Stone.

“I’ve always just tried to explore the music that means something to me,” he says. “I had a period where I had hits and sold a lot of albums, but I wasn’t really aiming for the pop charts with those albums. I was exploring the area I love, which has always been rhythm and blues music.”

So now it’s another path on the road for Boz Scaggs… music with a 30-piece orchestra!

For tickets, call The MACC box office at 242-SHOW (7469) or visit www.mauiarts.org.