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Phil Berkowitz, Bay Area blues harmonica master, will be performing with his band, The Dirty Cats at the legendary Yoshi's Jazz Club in San Francisco on Thursday, April 30th.  There will be two shows at 8 pm and 10 pm. Phil will be  featuring the music from his new CD entitled "All Night Party," which was just recently released.

The members of his band will include Charles Wheal on guitar and
Steve Wolf on bass, both who formerly backed the legendary harmonica player, Mark Hummel for eight years.  Also in the band will be William Beatty (formerly of Indigo Swing) on piano and Bowen Brown (formerly of Stompy Jones and John Lee Hooker's Coast-to-Coast Band), on drums. It guarantees to be a great night of top-notch blues and jazz.

Phil Berkowitz, a San Francisco Bay Area based blues harmonica player and vocalist, has brought his unique and energetic musical style to audiences for the better part of a decade. Phil is a New Jersey native and the 4th child in a family of six. He relocated to California in early 1989 to complete his college degree. It was during this time at Sonoma State University that he began playing the harmonica and fell in love with all forms of blues and jazz influenced
music.  He decided to front a band of his own and embarked on his lifelong journey of mastering every facet of the diatonic and chromatic harmonica. He has performed with a variety of top blues and jazz musicians such as Danny Caron, Sean Carney, Steve Freund, Wendy DeWitt, Dave Workman, Brenda Boykin, Jon Lawton, R.J. Mischo, Tom Rigney, Gary Smith, David Barrett, Kid Anderson, Kenny Blue Ray, Little David Rose, Lisa Kindred, Johnny Nitro, Billy Branch, Doug Deming and the late Gary Primich  just to name a few.

Phil's 2005 recording, "Louis' Blues, which pays tribute to the legendary R&B saxophonist, Louis Jordan, has received critical acclaim from magazines such as Living Blues and Blues Revue.  It also has been played on many radio stations across the country as well as abroad.  Locally, it has been played on Tom Mazzolini's "Blues by the Bay" show on KPFA in Berkeley, KCSM in San Mateo, KPOO in San Francisco, and KZSU in Palo Alto, just to name a few.  In the spring of 2008, Phil traveled to Brinkley, Arkansas, the birthplace of Louis Jordan, and performed at The Choo-Choo Ch'Boogie Festival.  In July of 2008, he performed a 100th anniversary celebration of Louis Jordan's birthday to a full house at Yoshi's jazz club in San Francisco.

Phil's most recent recording, "All Night Party", contains mostly original and musically diverse material that ranges from West Coast Swing, Chicago Blues, New Orleans R&B, Soul, and Country Blues.  It was co-produced by Danny Caron, former bandleader for the late Charles Brown, and features talented musicians such as Sean Carney and Bill Stuve.  

For more information, log onto www.philberkowitz.com

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