FORT COLLINS, CO – Thanks to your donations, Keeping the Blues Alive Foundation donated an ALESIS 8-pc Drum Kit and a Flagship Music Rug for the students at O’Dea Core Knowledge Elementary School in Fort Collins, CO! Students will enjoy an updated music room as the music rug encourages group activities, singing and dancing at a critical age of their development. Mrs. McLaren, a teacher at O’Dea Elementary says “My students have a love of learning, creating, and performing music! A general music classroom is a bit different from a standard grade level classroom in that every student in the school is a student in my classroom. This brings vast diversity into our classroom culture and into my teaching! In our daily learning we move, sing, dance, and play along with various styles of music to meet both the needs and interests of students and the requirements of our music standards and curriculum. Students come in to my classroom with varying levels of musical skill, knowledge and exposure, this makes my students and their learning needs unique.” Students at O’Dea were learning modern music with outdated materials and technology; crowding onto an ancient rug, doing their best to master skills and concepts of both modern and classic music with the limited and outdated resources available to them. “Updating our rug and drum set would allow students a comfortable learning environment along with the equipment and instrumetns they need to excel in the Little Kids Rock/Modern Band program offered as an enrichment opportunity here at O’Dea. A bright, clean, new rug will allow students more learning space when seated; students would have a clean learning space to sit, listen, write, sing, play instrumetns, and respond to music through our engaging lessons and activities. An electric drum set will bring new life, energy, and excitment to our fledgling Little Kids Rock/Modern Band program, through this program students as young as third grade are given the opportunity to form a band with their friends and learn music in a new way. Through modern rock and pop music students learn a new instrumen and how to work together as a band to master new skills and learning concepts such as chord progressions and song writing. Adding electric drums will give more students the opportunity to learn the drums as my clssroom currently only houses one standard drum set. Electric drums save space and offer quieter rehearsals with less disruption to the classrooms surrounding mine.” Thanks to the generosity of Joe Bonamassa fans and music lovers like you, Keeping the Blues Alive has funded Mrs. McLaren’s project and the materials will arrive just in time to prep for the new school year 🙂 Mrs. McLaren expresses her gratitude: Dear Keeping The Blues Alive Foundation, Inc., Words cannot express how thankful I am for your support of music education! I can’t wait to see my students faces when they see the new resources they will get to use to enhance their experience this year! I am especially grateful for my students with special needs who will be able to better engage in classroom activities with structured seating and adaptive equipment. Thank you all so much! With gratitude, Mrs. McLaren Keeping the Blues Alive Foundation is a 501c3 organization that makes a donation to a school in need of music instruments, supplies, sheet music, and more every week! Your donation helps us keep music in schools, while preserving blues heritage. Without your support, we would not be able to reach as many students around the country. We are grateful for your generosity.  To date, KTBA has reached over 63,000 students by sponsoring over 400 various music projects! The journey has been incredible! If you would like to help us to continue to grow, click here to make a donation! All donations are fully tax-deductible! Thank you for keeping music education in schools!

KTBA at Red Rocks Amphitheatre When asking any musician which venues top their list to play, Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado always sits at the top! On August 31st 2014, Joe Bonamassa and Keeping the Blues Alive did just that, playing to a sold out crowd of 9000 people! The single largest crowd of Joe’s career and what a place to host a show! With each ticket sold, $5 was donated directly to Keeping the Blues Alive foundation, raising $40,000 to fund struggling music programs around the nation! From the stunning Rocky Mountains surrounding the venue to the natural acoustics generated by the massive red rocks jutting up from within the earth, this venue is an awe inspiring sight to behold. Once underway, the show itself inspired just as much awe in the eyes of the fans as the venue did for me. Watching people sitting at the edge of their seats, singing along to every song and hanging on every word was enough to say that this was just as memorable of a night for them as it was for Joe. As a part of this memory filled weekend, a group of very special fans had the chance to have the Ultimate Joe Bonamassa at Red Rocks Experience! Thanks to their generous contributions to our auctions hosted on Charity Buzz and EBay, Suzanne Bowen and Ira Goldberg along with three of their family and friends got to spend a very memorable weekend in the Rockies! After disembarking from their flights they were whisked away to the beautiful Hotel Monaco located right in the heart of downtown Denver where they enjoyed a 2 night stay over the weekend. From there, we had them picked up in a private limousine and taken to the private dress rehearsal show and BBQ with Joe and the crew. Their weekend didn’t end there, on Sunday they were invited back and enjoyed 2nd row seats at the big show! Needless to say this was a weekend that will not easily be forgotten! And of course we can’t forget the man of the hour, dressed in his signature black suit surrounded by a band of white tuxedos and fedoras, Joe was impeccable! He played with all the confidence and class that we are accustomed to and seemed to not have a nervous bone in his body. Playing through a collection of some of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters’ best songs, we were taken on a journey through some of the Blues’ most memorable moments. As our guide through this incredible journey Joe was gracious, visually excited, truly moved and as he said “it was a boy’s dream come true to play this venue, so from that boy to you, thank you so much Colorado for making my dreams come true!” -Eric deTuscan.