Cole Stevens and the Delta Daggers, featuring special guest Rob Oliver, perform as part of the Hampton History Museum’s monthly concert series on Wednesday, November 14, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
The quartet will present an evening of their interpretations of classic tunes from the prewar Delta blues masters and the early 1950s, such as Son House, Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, T-Bone Walker and The Three Kings, among others. They will also perform original compositions steeped in Chicago style, West Coast swing and infectious Latin and funky New Orleans grooves.
Cole Stevens and The Delta Daggers are: Cole Prior Stevens, guitar and vocals; Mike Kazalski, bass and vocals; Peter Zink, drums and vocals; and special guest Rob Oliver on harmonica.
Admission is free to museum members, $5.00 for non-members. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Beer and wine will be available for purchase. Proceeds support the museum.
Held in the museum’s Great Hall on the third Wednesday of the month (a week early in November due to Thanksgiving), the “Front Porch” Music Series presents different genres of music that have shaped the American soundscape and influenced talent in Hampton Roads’ vibrant music scene.
The Hampton History Museum is located at 120 Old Hampton Lane in downtown Hampton. There is free parking in the garage across the street from the museum. For more information, call 757/727-1102.
Musician Bios
Cole Prior Stevens
Cole Prior Stevens was born in Southern California and lived there for 50 years. He began listening to the blues at the age of ten and his full time working mother raised Cole, two sisters and baby brother in the Los Angeles area in the early 60s. Listening to top 40 radio stations in LA, he began his musical interests early on. But his world was turned upside down when the family's Creole nanny from New Orleans, Mary Campbell, began to expose Cole to the blues, Motown and R&B music.
Mary would host rent parties and fundraisers for her Baptist Church in South Pasadena CA. Folks would come to Mary's for the Creole food she cooked. Her guest would bring portable record players and stacks of 45 vinyl records of their favorite blues and R&B artists playing one after another hours at a time.
Cole would sit in the corner of the dining room slurping a bowl of shrimp gumbo watching folks dance and sing along with the records. It didn't take more than a handful of tunes before he became hooked for life. He never heard anything like it, and he never saw people have such a great time because of it. When he attended church with Mary on Sundays he became further surprised and enthralled with Gospel Music.
By the time he was in junior high school he began playing in bands, starting with the drums, then moving on to bass guitar. By the time he got out of the USAF in 1974 he was playing bass guitar pretty steady doing shows with blues bands throughout SoCal. The 80s and 90s took Cole on the road all over the US and Canada opening shows and festivals for many national acts. By 1994 he began to seriously write music and taught himself slide guitar and harmonica.
Peter Zink
Hailing from Yorktown VA, Peter Zink has been playing drums professionally since the age of ten. He got his early start performing in Drum & Fife marching and exhibition bands all the way into adulthood. Pete as toured all over the US and as professional and historic military drum corps re-enactor, Pete has played as a drummer and actor in five major motion pictures, “Gettysburg,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “The Patriot,” “The Day Lincoln Was Shot” and “Tecumseh.”
Peter also performed in several Busch Gardens show bands for many years, as well as being a parrot trainer for many of the show birds. He was an elementary school teacher for 20 years and has been the specialty go-to-drummer of Hampton Roads for many decades.
Mike Kazalski
Michael was born and raised in upstate New York and is the product of a very progressive school music system that encouraged exploration of a student's total desire to make music. He has played trombone, bass trombone, euphonium, tuba, 'cello, double bass, drums, and percussion, and spent two years marching with a drum and bugle corps, shouldering the bugler's version of a marching tuba.
As a bassist, he likes to blur the lines between jazz, rock, blues, country, and even classical music. He does not consider himself a “genre” bassist, feeling that bass can be applied to almost any situation. He has played bass in pit orchestras (for musicals,) jazz ensembles, Celtic bands, and concert bands, always seeking to broaden his education of how bass works and where he can fit it.
Rob Oliver
Rob Oliver is an instrumentalist and vocalist who plays guitar and harmonica in styles varying from pop to rock to rhythm & blues and everything in between. His range of influences consist of The Beatles, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Little Walter, Paul Butterfield, and Big Walter Horton to name a few. He has been performing original and cover music in Hampton Roads for over twenty years in both electric and acoustic settings. Some bands he has been a member of include Two Foot Small, Softstone, The Retailers, Departure, The Grifters, The Groove Cats, and An Act of Kindness.