Sax Chick Rosemary Casey returns to the blues music scene

Rosemary Casey has become a fixture in the greater-Boston blues scene for the second time in her life. Casey dropped out of the scene at least a decade ago to raise a family. These days, she’s back with a vengeance, and she’s put together a work-when-they-can band called Rosemary’s Baby Blues.

 Casey had been a flute player all through junior high school and high school, but she fell in love with the sax when she was a groupie for Watson’s band. A member of the Watson band told her that if she could play the flute then she could play the sax because the fingering is the same.

“As soon as I heard that I was like, ‘All right. That’s It. I have to pick up the saxophone.’” Casey said. She inherited her father’s 1927 Buscher. She still uses it today and has it maintenanced regularly. Casey and Bernath used to practice in an abandoned warehouse. “We had a pretty good set up there,” she recalled fondly. “We used to record our practices in there. We used to throw parties in there.”

She was also, in her early days, checking out Little Joe Cook at the Can tab Lounge in Cambridge and Chris Stovall Brown when Brown was running a blues jam in Cambridge. Casey logged in a lot of hours jamming at The Tam in Brookline. From jamming she moved on to a band called Juggernaut. Casey described it as a GB band that performed a lot of soul music, four singers, a lot of harmony. That band played in the Faneuil Hall area on Marshall Street. Around that time in Casey’s career, Hallmark Cards had found Juggernaut on the web and hired them to play a promo event. “They were trying to promote this new line of cards,” she said. “We did it at Faneuil Hall and at Copley Place. We just played and some people from Hallmark were there passing out cards.”

 Casey conveys her history and experiences with a quick, breathy enthusiasm, darting in and out of time periods and in and out of different band stories. Working in higher education keeps her grounded. She had an undergraduate degree in public relations and communications. She also had a Master’s degree in counseling and psychology. Several years ago, she was working as a booking agent for an entertainment promo company that owned The Channel when she saw a job opening at a college doing alumni relations. The college hired her to do the same work she did for the entertainment company.

“It’s kind of a weird career path,” Casey said. “I got more and more into technology too. I became this technology guru at college, and don’t ask me how. I was tired of technology. I was the technology expert in the alumni and development office. “Then she went to work for Babson and eventually started managing the consulting programs.

“Sax” Gordon Beadle had played a role in her reentry into her second music career. She started out as a fan and befriended him through a mutual friend. She took lessons from Beadle and picked his brain after e-mailing him. Beadle introduced her to many prominent players, and she found herself jamming with many of the musicians she had worked with ten years earlier.

Casey’s band Rosemary’s Baby plays out once or twice a month at places like the Chicken Bone and (new club) the Stadium in Framingham, Daniels in Henniker, New Hampshire, and a Gilligan’s Island in Westerly, Rhode Island.

Rosemary’s BabyBlues also includes guitarist Jack Ward, organist Ron Levy, drummer Larry Bassick, bass player Mike Walker, and occasionally some additional horn players like Beadle, John Moriconi on trumpet, and John Abrahamsen, too, on trumpet.

For now, Casey is just having fun with her band and does not have any immediate plans to record a CD or to do a lot of marketing.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rosemarys-Baby-Blues/327510431994

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