Albert Cummings

Tickets cost $22 in advance, $27 day of show (including all service charges). They are also available by phone through Hold My Ticket at 505-886-1251.

In the trajectory of watching great musicians develop, there is no set timetable. Some appear full-blown right from the start, and others can take a whole career to get to that elevated place.  Albert Cummings arrived strong right at the beginning and has kept growing over a course of endless tours and nine previous albums, right up to today with the release of the album Ten. It's the kind of recording that shows exactly why all the accolades and excitement have been deserved. Now, it's an irrevocable truth that the musician has made his full-on breakthrough.

And it comes at exactly the perfect time, when the world is looking into what might be in store past the challenging experience of the pandemic for the last two years. Music, being one of the world's tried and true joys of life, has always had a way of bringing healing and inspiration to listeners, and at no time in recent decades has it been needed more than now.

Raised in Massachusetts and self-taught on the banjo, it was a 1987 concert by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble that opened Cummings to a new world of modern blues and inspired him to take up the guitar. It didn't take long from there for him to find his way to the front of the pack. In fact, Albert Cummings' very first album From the Heart (2003) was produced by Double Trouble's Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon and included the group's Reese Wynans on keyboards. 

From that first album, the burgeoning blues world of the 2000s opened its doors for Albert Cummings. He recorded several albums for Blind Pig Records, and on 2012's No Regrets, the guitarist extended the boundaries outside the blues world to include country and rock influences like he really hadn't before. It was obvious that the musician did not want to limit himself in any way, and saw a wider possibility for where his music could go. With its release on Cummings' own indie label imprint, Ivy Music, Ten is a full realization of that possibility.