Musicians tend to do a bit of everything – but not Mike Garner.

Particularly in a place the size of Tauranga you'll find most musicians have played a broad range of music. If you're a guitarist you've probably played in a covers band or three and made music that might range from folk to metal.

This is just the reality of things: it's a smallish city and options are limited. Many musicians will pursue the style of music they most want to play while dabbling in all sorts of other stuff on the side, whether to gain experience, to make a buck, or just for the sheer pleasure of playing music.

In the great scheme of things you might prefer country music to jazz but that doesn't mean you can't have a bunch of fun playing jazz while you're setting up those country gigs...

But not Mike Garner.

Mike plays the blues. Well, sings and plays and writes the blues. For as long as I've known him Mike has been a bluesman. He founded the Hamilton Blues Society 30 years ago when he lived there and the Rotorua Blues Club a decade or so later when he switched cities. For the past decade he's been living in Papamoa.

If you've read this column over time you would probably know this since I have written about him on and off for years, as he has toured the country continually and released a string of critically-acclaimed albums.

Headlines

And therein lies a bit of a problem for anyone dedicated to a craft so specific: ‘Mike Garner Plays The Blues' is a great headline for the first story but ‘Mike Garner Plays The Blues (Again)' isn't so good. Once you reach ‘Mike Garner Is Still Playing The Blues (Again)' a certain amount of deja vu is creeping in and, over time, it's easy to start taking what he does for granted.

This is particularly true for Mike since, between tours, he makes himself so available. Most recently he's played the Blues, Roots & Groove Festival in Palmerston North and a series of South Island gigs with harmonica maestro, Neil Billington. But here in Tauranga you can always catch him one Saturday night each month at The Barrel Room in a blues duo for free.

So when he puts on a special ticketed show here I suspect there are folk who rather take it for granted, assuming it'll be the same thing, the same songs they'll be able to hear of a Saturday for free...

Well, I'm here to tell you that you're making mistake! While those monthly downtown gigs are a generous treat presenting one of the country's top bluesmen in a relaxed intimate surrounding for free – seriously, what more do you want? – The key word in 'special ticketed show” is 'special”.

November

At the start of November Mike is 'getting the band back together”, recreating a fantastic tour he undertook last year. This is the quartet known as the Ragtime Washboard Kings, with drummer/washboard player Warren Houston returning from Motueka in the South Island and upright bass player Stuart Lawrence coming back from Dargaville. Multi-instrumentalist (including washboard) Robbie Laven completes the band.

Between them they delve into some of the most entertaining blues ever made, the wonderful sounds of the early Mississippi Delta and other southern states, mainly originating between the two world wars, incorporating acoustic guitar, slide guitar, mandolin, fiddle, djembe, cahon, and all sorts of eclectic acoustic sounds as well as, of course, those two washboards.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a washboard is just that. A corrugated metal, wooden or glass board that people actually used to wash clothes in the days before Fisher & Paykel invented the washing machine. It was a mainstay of early blues and continues today to be a defining feature of Zydeco music. Search the name Clifton Chenier on YouTube and you'll see what I mean.

Together the Ragtime Washboard Kings create something special. They're at The Arts Junction in Katikati on Thursday November 3 and The Jam Factory on Saturday, November 5. Tickets are $25, available from the respective venue's websites.