Chico Banks

Along with Bernard Allison, Melvin Taylor and a handful of others, guitarist, singer and songwriter Chico Banks is part of the new generation of Chicago blues players who are expanding the boundaries of this often maligned, misunderstood music. Like Allison and Taylor, and even older Southern musicians like Larry Garner and Sherman Robertson, Banks focuses on good-time, upbeat blues. Banks' music may not impress blues purists -- he freely mixes in elements of soul, funk and rock -- but when a musical form remains too static, as the late Luther Allison would say, it loses its...