Little Charlie & the Nightcats was an American

electric blues Electric blues is blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be popularly amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Ho ...

and

swing revival The swing revival, also called retro swing and neo-swing, was a renewed interest in swing music and Lindy Hop dance, beginning around 1989 and reaching a peak in the 1990s. The music was generally rooted in the big bands of the swing era, swing e ...

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, active from 1976-2008. Several members reformed as Rick Estrin & The Nightcats.

Biography

Charles Baty (1953–2020) was studying mathematics at

University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley ...

when he and Rick Estrin (born 1949) formed Little Charlie & the Nightcats in 1976. Their first album, ''All the Way Crazy'', was issued in 1987. It includes the songs "Poor Tarzan", "Suicide Blues" and "When Girls Do It". The following album, ''Disturbing the Peace'' (1988), included "That's My Girl", "My Money's Green", "She's Talking" and "Nervous". They began touring in the United States and internationally. They played at the

San Francisco Blues Festival The San Francisco Blues Festival was active from 1973 until 2008, and was located in San Francisco, California. It was one of the longest running blues festival in the United States. History Tom Mazzolini, the event's producer, founded the bl ...

in 1980 and 1982, the

Montreal International Jazz Festival The Festival international de Jazz de Montréal is an annual jazz festival held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Montreal Jazz Fest holds the 2004 Guinness World Record as the world's largest jazz festival. Every year it features roughly 3,000 ar ...

, the San Diego Street Scene,

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Bumbershoot Bumbershoot is an annual international music and arts festival held in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington. One of North America's largest such festivals, it takes place every Labor Day (United States), Labor Day weekend (leading up to and ...

Festival and the

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Jazz & Classics Festival in 2002. Their 1993 album, ''Night Vision'', was produced by

Joe Louis Walker Louis Joseph Walker Jr. (December 25, 1949 – April 30, 2025), known as Joe Louis Walker, was an American musician, best known as an electric blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer. His knowledge of blues history is revealed by his u ...

, who also performed on it. The album included "My Next Ex-Wife," which won a W.C. Handy Award for Song of the Year. The band's drummer, Dobie Strange, was replaced by June Core in 1996. In early 2008, Baty announced he was entering "soft" retirement and no longer toured with the band, except for reunion tours and shows in Europe and select

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festivals. Baty performed with

JW-Jones JW-Jones (born July 15, 1980) is a Canadians, Canadian blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and band leader. He is a Juno Award nominee (2015), ''Billboard Magazine, Billboard'' magazine Top 10 Selling artist, and winner of the International Blues ...

at the Mont Tremblant Blues Festival, Ottawa Bluesfest, and Piazza Blues in Bellinzona, Switzerland, in July 2009. Estrin continued with the band, which was renamed Rick Estrin & The Nightcats. Baty was replaced on guitar by Chris "Kid" Andersen (born 1980), originally from

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, Norway. Andersen had backed

Charlie Musselwhite Charles Douglas Musselwhite (born January 31, 1944) is an American blues harmonica player and bandleader who came to prominence, along with Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop, as a pivotal figure in helping to revive the Chicago ...

and Terry Hanck, and had fronted his own band. Baty's most recent blues

recording A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, re ...

was as a guest on JW-Jones's ''Bluelisted'' (2008), an album which marked the first time in his career that he documented his harmonica playing on a recording and the first time he and another West Coast blues musician,

Junior Watson Junior Watson is an American jump blues guitarist and singer. Career Watson is a West Coast blues guitarist. He was a founding member of the blues band The Mighty Flyers and, starting in the early 1980s, he performed with the band for a decade. ...

, had recorded together on the same tracks. In 2013, Estrin was nominated for a

Blues Music Award The Blues Music Awards, formerly known as the W. C. Handy Awards (or "The Handys"), are awards presented by the Blues Foundation, a non-profit organization set up to foster blues heritage. The awards were originally named in honor of W. C. Handy, " ...

in the category B.B. King Entertainer. He was nominated again in 2014 for the same award, and the ensemble was nominated for Band of the Year. Charlie Baty died on March 6, 2020, aged 66, in

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following a

heart attack A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when Ischemia, blood flow decreases or stops in one of the coronary arteries of the heart, causing infarction (tissue death) to the heart muscle. The most common symptom ...

.Hudson, Jeff
"Remembering Little Charlie: Popular bluesman Charles Baty passes away"
Davis (CA) Enterprise, 9 March 2020 (accessed 11 March 2020).

Selected discography

References

External links

Rick Estrin & The NightcatsAlligator Records review
{{DEFAULTSORT:Little Charlie and the Nightcats American blues musical groups West Coast blues musicians Alligator Records artists Musical groups from Sacramento, California