Blues harmonica great Tom Walbank wrapping up 25 years in Tucson

Tucson bluesman Tom Walbank wasn’t supposed to start playing until 8 that first Thursday April night.

But by 7:15, 7:20, the small downtown Tap & Bottle was already filling up.

They moved out the tables and left the chairs, which were quickly accounted for. Latecomers squeezed nearly shoulder to shoulder in the open spaces or leaned against the taproom’s worn brick walls as Walbank took his guitar from its case and pulled out his trademark harmonica.

Drummer Dimitri Manos, Mighty Joel Ford on washboard, Sean Rogers on standup bass and keyboardist Ken Saydak were already jamming with Walbank when Gabriel Sullivan squeezed past a few guys crowding the taproom’s front door at 7:45.

“This poster says 8,” Sullivan told Walbank as he started unpacking his electric guitar.

“Yeah, man, we just couldn’t wait. Like, we just want to get to it,” Walbank responded over the music.

The quintet’s rocking blues and Walbank’s soaring harmonica spilled out of the nearly 100-year-old building that has been home to Tap & Bottle since 2013 and a regular stage for Walbank for a good stretch of the past decade.

But that Thursday night was the first of several lasts for Walbank.

In a matter of weeks, the native of England, who has lived in Tucson 25 of his 55 years, is moving to Washington, D.C.

His wife, Leia Maahs, the former managing director of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, took a new job and is already in Washington. Walbank and their 14-year-old daughter will follow in early June.

“I’ve lived in Tucson longer than I lived in England,” said Walbank, who in 1997 moved to the U.S. from Edinburgh, Scotland, where he had met and married his American wife.

The couple lived in her native California three years before moving to Tucson at the suggestion of a friend, who raved about the music scene.

“I moved here and fell in love with it,” Walbank recounted in a late March interview.

Walbank took the customary day job to pay the bills — laying tile, slinging coffee, working the graveyard shift at Hotel Congress — and spent his nights introducing Tucson to his blues, which dipped into the East Coast Piedmont style perfected by harmonica greats Charlie Musselwhite, Phil Wiggins and Sonny Terry, and Deep South Mississippi Delta blues.

He was a regular at Congress Street’s Seven Black Cats open mic nights and landed a standing gig at the neighboring Red Room in the notorious greasy spoon The Grill.

Walbank’s rough-hewn vocals conveyed a side of blues informed by passion and what Sullivan describes as an underlying punk rock ethos.

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“There’s certainly some fantastic blues musicians in town, but I just think in general, the blues scene is overrun by what I call ponytail blues. It’s like dudes in Hawaiian shirts playing basic Stratocasters and ripping off every Chicago blues lick there is,” Sullivan said. “And then you get the real deal like Tom that’s more punk than what I think the old point of blues was, an expression of necessity. ... When I hear Tom play, it’s like, that’s real blues.”

The Red Room had a small stage crowded with a piano where Walbank would play. Some nights when he wasn’t playing, he’d end up there, like that night in late 2003 when Tucson native and boogie-woogie pianist Arthur Migliazza was playing.

He asked if he could jump in, and that impromptu collaboration became a lifelong friendship.

“We became instant friends and we basically played together ever since,” including as a duo in the 2010 International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee; they made it to the finals, said Migliazza, who left Tucson 15 years ago and now lives in Rhode Island.

Walbank played the Red Room on the regular for six years before he traded the grungy downtown hipster scene for a standing Sunday afternoon gig at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort. For the past 15 years, he and drummer Manos have been the entertainment for the resort’s weekly Blues, Brews & BBQ Brunch. He also picks up gigs like his early April show at Tap & Bottle and is a regular collaborator with a handful of Tucson musicians.

“There’s almost no record that I produce that I don’t call him on,” said Sullivan, who has his hands in a number of musical pots from his cumbia rock band XIXA to solo shows and touring with English post-punk rockers Modern English.

Sullivan said one of Walbank’s biggest contributions to Tucson’s music scene in recent years has been organizing musicians around a single cause, from helping foreign musicians get visas to come to Tucson during President Trump’s first administration, to coordinating and producing benefit recordings including “Hotmatic Blues” to raise money for musicians sidelined by the pandemic; “Low Blows for Ida,” to benefit victims of 2021’s Hurricane Ida in Louisiana; and his most recent effort, “Harp Love for LA,” released last month to benefit victims of January’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires.

“It’s going to be a huge loss to the music scene here,” Sullivan said.

“He’s one of the best harmonica players, easily, in the world,” added Migliazza, who hopes to reunite with Walbank on stage once he’s settled in Washington. “Tucson was, I think, really fortunate to have him there for so long.”

Walbank said he’s going to take some time to adjust to life in Washington before he dives into the music scene, but he’s confident once he does, he’ll find his place there much like he found his place in Tucson.

“I’ll take some time to adjust and then I’ll start playing,” said the Arizona Blues Hall of Famer.

And even though he’ll be 2,000 miles from Tucson, the Old Pueblo will never be far from his thoughts.

“If I start talking, I’ll sound like a tourist advert for the place, but you know yourself, you live here,” he said. “It’s like you can go up Mount Lemmon, you can go up to Gates Pass. You can go south and you can park at a canyon, go down to the lake down there, or something. You know, there’s so much variety here.”

“I’ve been in Tucson ... most of my adult life,” he added. “It’ll always be home.”

Walbank has only a few Tucson shows before he leaves, including the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame induction show April 26 at Monterey Court, 505 W. Miracle Mile; and his finale May 17 at Wooden Tooth Records, 426 E. Seventh St.

You can also find him at the Loews Ventana Canyon Blues, Brews & BBQ, 7000 N. Resort Drive, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays through May 25.

Photos: Blues musician Tom Walbank farewell gig at Tap and Bottle