Eden Brent

Boogie-woogie piano and gutsy vocals have established Eden Brent as a Mississippi favorite. Whether booked as a solo artist or bandleader, her performance is fresh and spontaneous, often filled with audience requests and participation.

Portrayed by one critic as “Bessie Smith meets Diana Krall meets Janis Joplin,” other critics have compared her to Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn and Norah Jones. Never mind the comparisons. This self-described “song interpreter” is a one-of-a-kind, and her interpretations of jazz, blues, soul and pop, in addition to her own songs, are expressive and memorable.

A native of Greenville, Mississippi, Brent is the solo winner of the Blues Foundation International Blues Challenge 2006 and is the 2005 Mississippi Delta Regional Blues Challenge solo winner. She received the Greenville Arts Council Greenville Honors Its Own Artist Award in 2004 and was a 2004 Greenville Blues Walk inductee. Listed on the Mississippi Arts Commission Artist Roster since 1994, Brent is currently listed with SouthernArtistry.org, an adjudicated web-based roster of Southeastern artists maintained by the Southern Arts Federation.

Brent performs regularly at Mississippi clubs and festivals, the Mississippi Delta Blues & Heritage Festival and the Highway 61 Blues Festival among them, and she will appear in 2006 at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis, the B. B. King Homecoming in Indianola, the Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland, Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival in Alberta, and aboard the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise sailing from San Diego. Past notable dates include the British Embassy in Washington, the My South celebration in New York, and her appearance along with B. B. King at the Red, White, & Blues celebration in Washington during the 2005 Inauguration of President George W. Bush.

Brent enjoyed a sixteen-year apprenticeship with duo partner, the late Boogaloo Ames (1918 – 2002), who dubbed her “Little Boogaloo.” Although she achieved a Bachelor of Music from the University of North Texas, Brent credits Ames with teaching her to play piano. “Music school taught me to think, but Booglaoo taught me to boogie-woogie,” she says.

Together with Ames, Brent starred in the 1999 television documentary, Boogaloo & Eden: Sustaining the Sound. The award-winning feature, which aired nationally on PBS affiliates, explores the bond between mentor and protégé. Under Ames’s tutelage, Brent performed not only across Mississippi, but also at the Gibson Showcase Lounge in Memphis, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

The pair’s final appearance was in the 2002 South African television production, Forty Days in the Delta, a blues documentary series taped in Mississippi shortly before Ames’s death. The program spurred Brent’s 2002 solo tour in South Africa, and a second solo tour and the release of her debut album, Something Cool, followed a year later in 2003.

Dedicated to Ames, Something Cool reached number two on the South Africa Rock Digest chart, and Brent’s balladic tribute to that country, “South Africa,” reached number three on the singles chart. About the song, Brent reflected, “I had spent so many years with Boogaloo, and I was a little lost without him. So, in the months after his death, traveling half way around the world by myself was liberating, and I wanted to express that joy to the people there.”

Four years after Ames’s death, Brent has secured her place in Mississippi Delta music, allowing her own style to evolve while continuing Ames’s legacy. Recently featured on public radio's Beale Street Caravan, she has also been heard on Thacker Mountain Radio, Night Train, Blues in the Night, and other public radio and blues broadcasts throughout the nation.