Java Blend

The Awful Purdies – encore broadcast

Formed in the summer of 2006 by former member Amy Finders and founding member Annie Savage, The Awful Purdies is a five-piece all female Iowa band featuring Katie Roche on accordion, whistles and percussion, Marcy Rosenbaum on guitar and mandolin, Nicole Upchurch on banjo and percussion, Katie Burnes on cello, and newest member Sarah Cram on guitar. All members are singer-songwriters who together create original music as diverse as the backgrounds of the women in the group.

Ray Bonneville – encore broadcast

Ray Bonneville is a roaming blues poet, inspired by the road and the many other places he has called home—New Orleans, Colorado, Arkansas, Alaska, Boston, Seattle, Paris, France, Montreal and Austin Texas. Born in Canada and raised in the United States, Bonneville has lived all over. No place, however, has been more influential than New Orleans. Like the great American writers of the south and his favorite authors Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, Bonneville is inspired by the places he has been and the unusual people he has met throughout his travels. Honing his craft for the last 30 years, Bonneville’s gritty storytelling and deep-grooving blues style has won him much critical attention. He has toured all over the world, sharing the bill with such blues legends as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, J.J. Cale and Robert Cray. His latest CD is titled Goin’ By Feel.

Somewhere between a bar and the recording studio, Miles Nielsen stirs up his own pop rock brand of Beatles-eque Cosmic Americana. Pop rock arrangements and sunny melodies tucked between a long lost country folk steel guitar floating through speakers around crashing drums, bouncing bass lines and smooth as butter keys. Born in Rockford, IL, home of Cheap Trick and 'Symbol', power-pop DNA runs through the veins of his songs and performances.