Meet Sugar Brown
Born in 1971 and raised in Bowling Green, Ohio, Sugar Brown was born as Ken Chester Kawashima to a Japanese father and Korean mother who both immigrated to the United States in the mid-1960s. Now a permanent resident of Toronto, Canada, Sugar Brown is a modern blues musician, singer and songwriter. His brand of dark, sweet, and inconsolable blues has caught the attention of the Canadian music scene, winning the Toronto Blues Society Talent Search and quickly receiving invitations to play at the Kitchener Blues Festival and the prestigious Mariposa Folk Festival.
Sugar Brown’s blues originated while studying as a college student at the University of Chicago. By day, he studied history, political economy, and philosophy; by night he learned to play the blues from Chicago’s famed West Side blues raconteur and singer, Taildragger, as well as from blues legends such as Dave Myers and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, the late drummer of Muddy Waters’ band. Sugar Brown’s blues were shaped by playing the small clubs and venues along the West Side of Chicago, where…MORE
Lousy Dime by Sugar Brown
“Everybody’s scrambling for the same lousy dime”
Sugar Brown: The Shade of Blues.
Dr. Ken Kawashima, aka Sugar Brown, developed his signature sound -- a visceral and sometimes dark approach to the blues -- at a handful of smokey bars in Chicago's West Side and Tokyo.
In Sugar Brown: The Shade of Blues, filmmaker Justin Lee explores racial issues within music. The film ultimately shows how "there's no essential race to a genre of music," and that it is merely "a fabrication".