JUBAL KANE

To understand the philosophy behind Jubal Kane's fierce, take-no-prisoners roadhouse blues, one must first contemplate singer and harmonica player Ace Andersson, who huffs and puffs like smokestack lightnin,' and is a galvanizing, hypnotizing, bearded and beast-like fireball onstage.

He has the blood - and the crazy yellow beard - of a plundering Norse warrior.

Anderson was born and raised in Sweden - he was called Varg Bland Kvinnor, if that helps - and he made music for a living but got restless and gave up on trying to channel the Chicago gutbucket blues from the frozen tundra. In 1999, he came to America and eventually wound up in unincorporated Lizard Lick, N.C., where he met Buckwheat (Guitar/Bass) , they started makin' some noise - as the song goes - and called the unit Jubal Kane.

"He was," explained Andersson, "the first musician ever referenced in any kind of writing, as far as we know. He's part of that Cain and Abel clan, that whole family. His brothers were doing weapons of war, and he felt like he should do something else. Something better for his family. And God told him, you can be a musician. He was actually the first harp player, but not the mouth harp, the stringed harp."

Jubal Kane has become a Savannah favorite over the last two years; they've played virtually every club on the downtown grid. People like the band because there are no frills, and no pretentious rambling, and no interminable "salute to the greats of blues" shtick. They just get up and play. And boil.

"When me, Buckwheat started the band, our philosophy was that if we're going to play covers, we're going to play obscure covers," Andersson told us. "And we're going to do them our way.

"We do a version of "Going Down," and we listened to it one time in the van before we first went onstage and played it. We listen to it to get our bearings, and then we'll do it to see how it works out.