Philipp Fankhauser

Philipp Fankhauser, a Swiss blues singer and guitarist born in 1964 in Thun, Switzerland, achieved Top Ten success in his native country after two decades of recording. He first picked up an instrument in the late '70s once an unexpected teenage fascination with the blues took hold. That fascination deepened in 1981 when he caught Albert Collins at the Montreux Jazz Festival; other American blues icons he witnessed there during the early '80s included B.B. King, Koko Taylor, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. A 1984 appearance by Johnny “Clyde” Copeland made an especially deep mark, leading to a personal acquaintance and a mentoring relationship that guided the young Swiss musician just as performing began to occupy him full-time.

Fankhauser launched the Checkerboard Blues Band in 1987 and spent the next several years crisscrossing Switzerland for dozens of gigs annually. The group’s original lineup featured vocalist Margie Evans, and their first release, Blues for the Lady, arrived in 1989 with Fankhauser handling production and vocals. Without Evans, the band followed up in 1991 with With a Feeling; two further projects, Dedicated in 1992 and the live set Thun-San Francisco in 1994 (which brought Evans back), preceded Fankhauser’s solo outing On Broadway, cut in Memphis in 1995 under producer and songwriter Dennis Walker. From 1994 onward he made his home in the United States, touring alongside Copeland until the Texan’s death in 1997. A retrospective, His Kind of Blues, surfaced in 1996 to bridge the gap.

After returning to Switzerland in 2000, Fankhauser revived the Checkerboard Blues Band for Welcome to the Real World. A subsequent live document, Live — So Damn Cool, credited to the Philipp Fankhauser Blues Band and spotlighting the trio format, appeared in 2003. He then secured a deal with Memphis International Records and delivered the solo album Talk to Me, recorded in Memphis with David Less in 2004. A move to the Sony BMG imprint Funk House Blues yielded his strongest commercial results yet: Watching from the Safe Side in 2006 reached the Swiss Top 20, while Love Man Riding in 2008 climbed into the Top Ten.