by ADA Staff

In a year when the trumpet, violin and piano will be featured by legendary and soon-to-be-legendary jazz musicians at the Clarksville Jazz Festival, the annual honors of induction into the Austin Jazz Hall of Fame will go to two local guitar heroes. Mitch Watkins and Henry "Blues Boy" Hubbard will be recognized this year for their contributions to Austin jazz music.

Watkins has been a very busy man of late, having produced wife Abra Moore's latest CD as well as leading her touring band. When able to stay in town, he still gigs regularly at the Elephant Room where, along with fellow jazz guitarist Russ Scanlon, he churns out the electric jazz with bemused abandon.

After an educational period of going to UT and playing with James Polk and other established local players, Watkins came into his own with the plugged-in combo Passenger, which also featured Roscoe Beck and Paul Ostermeyer. Passenger provided the city's first contemporary funked-up electric jazz combo, fanning the local flames for what bands like Weather Report were creating nationally. They also did a stint as the touring band with Leonard Cohen, helping to establish the connection between Cohen and Austin that continues with Steve Zirkle and others.

Everyone's favorite sideman, one hell of a jazz guitarist, Mitch Watkins will be inducted at the Jazz Awards show on Wednesday June 11th.

Henry "Blues Boy" Hubbard, as you might expect, plays blues. The intrinsic link between the blues and jazz music necessitates that blues musicians be included in this ceremony: to exclude blues players would be to inhibit and make incorrect the historical record that this awards project cites as one of its aims. Without inclusion of previous inductees like T.D. Bell and W.C. Clark, in addition to Hubbard and many others, the timeline would be gapped beyond legitimacy. So, Blues Boy Hubbard will also take his place in the lineage of Austin's renowned guitar greats.

Though his touring these days is mostly limited to annual invitations to travel abroad to the Utrecht Blues Festival, local shows keep him plenty busy. Hubbard and his band, the Jets, play in town at Antone's just about every Friday night, and their sets are wonderfully boisterous trips through classic R&B and blues catalogs.

While working at Bergstrom Air Force Base in the early '50s as a jet mechanic (hence the band's name), Hubbard began to come into town to places like the Victory Grill and the Show Bar (which became Charlie's Playhouse). He quickly established himself as a guitar force to be reckoned with, and gained the attention of local musicians like T.D. Bell and Bill Campbell, as well as becoming a source of inspiration and information for up-and-comers like Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Hubbard will be inducted into the Hall at his performance in Pease Park on Sunday June 15th.