Jake La Botz…

Blues musician finds a home on the internet.
LOS ANGELES, CA — Since the age his hands could reach around the neck of a guitar,  and probably even before that time, jazz blues prodigy, Jake La Botz has been amazing music fans all over the world.

From Jake’s site (go listen):  Jake La Botz was conceived while his parents listened to a record by Texas bluesman and sharecropper Mance Lipscomb.

He moved to Chicago when he was a toddler with his father, a truck driver and union organizer as well as a journalist. La Botz says that his dad was the only white reporter at the black newspaper, the Chicago Daily Defender.

As a boy, he was exposed to different cultures and ideas, from the political meetings held at his home to hanging out in his melting pot Uptown neighborhood. Driven by an artistic lust La Botz took to traveling around the city when he was 8 or 9 and ushered at local theatres to be close to the stage and see plays for free.

As an adolescent, he discovered the library where he listened to blues and hillbilly records or soaked up the romantic adventure stories of writers like Nelson Algren, Jack London, Louis Ferdinand Celine, B. Traven, and the Beats.

His heart set on acting, Jake made it into a fine arts program at a Chicago public high school and majored in drama for one year before he discovered punk rock. “The punk scene was a natural place for a misfit kid to end up in the 80′s. I identified with the emotional rawness of the music and got a feeling of belonging somewhere. I later got that same feeling hanging around with the old bluesmen.”   JAKE’S SITE

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