With the creation of the European Blues Union, we decided to start with an annual event, the Europoean Blues Challenge, that took place in Berlin for the first two years, 2011 and 2012. Then with all our member we decided to change the EBC format, and visiting every year a different country, to be closer to national situations and give the opportunity to local bands to be know by the team of professionals and experts that are our main core.

For this reason we started to host during the EBC days a Blues Market, a unique opportunity for our members to promote their activity, reaching in one shot the biggest audience for the blues in Europe.

But our ideas started to run faster, and we created the Blues Behind The Scenes Awards, a official award for all people that were working hard to build a blues community but away from stages and lights.

We also started to collect materials from all over Europe to realize a Blues Expo, that has been visiting different cities and countries, like Norway, France and Belgium, and that is always hosted by Santa Tecla library in Barcellona.

Another great collaboration project, The Euopean Blues Night, started from Vallemaggia Blues Festival, is a format we proudly support and promote, for European Blues Festivals, in order to host European bands that were playing in one of the last EBC, not only winners, depending on the musical taste of the festival producer, with a special eye open on national bands.

Finally our main efforts started to look at the future, so we created the Blues For Youth Program that consists in a couple of grants for young European musicians to have the opportunity to be part of the Little Steven Blues School in Notodden, Norway and the Pinetop Perkins Foundation Workshop in Clarksdale, Mississippi. We have other bullets to shoot for new generations, very important especially after this years of pandemic due to Covid-19, and soon we will all together start working on!

EBU Projects