March 3, 2016: Live Blues Music with Greg Koch and the Tone Controls

This Thursday, March 3rd at 10 am, we invite you to attend a special Wisconsin Public Radio Route 51 event: a live broadcast of a free concert featuring internationally acclaimed guitarist Greg Koch and the Tone Controls. The Blues in the Schools concert will take place in the Veninga Theater in the UW Center for Civic Engagement on the UW-Marathon County campus in Wausau. Born in Milwaukee in 1966, Koch studied jazz guitar at UW-Stevens Point, and won First Prize in the 1989 Bluesbreaker Guitar Showdown judged by legendary bluesman Buddy Guy.
Greg Koch and the Tone Controls went on to win five Wisconsin Area Music Awards for Blues Artist of the Year (‘93, ‘95 through ‘98), and Koch personally took in seven WAMA awards as Guitarist of the Year (‘92, ‘94 through ‘99). In its 2001 feature story, Guitar Player magazine described Koch’s approach this way: “An impossible stream of riffs jumps off of Koch’s fretboard like clowns spilling out of a VW bug – and when you’re convinced that there can be no more, out pops another one.” He has released 13 CDs.
Host Glen Moberg will ask Greg Koch about his love of the blues, his musical influences, his work as a guitar clinic instructor for the Fender company, and his technical knowledge of guitars, amps and effects pedals. The free concert is sponsored in part by the Great Northern Blues Society, and will feature young, local blues musicians.​​