The musicologist Jean-Paul Levet claims that Cisco Herzhaft was the first French musician to record a blues in 1968. However it may be, Herzhaft was born near Bordeaux in 1947, and it's probably true. Introduced to music through folk and blues during the sixties, Cisco Herzhaft was a pioneer. Alone with his guitar, he traveled the roads playing folk and blues, a vagabond moving between cities and villages, corners and alleys, dirty bars and places of low decency. His career as a musician cannot be defined in any other way than as a bluesman—he masters slide and fingerpicking and plays his own songs. Influenced by his older brother, blues historian Gérard Herzhaft (author of "Grande Encyclopédie du Blues"), Cisco soaked up American folk music before getting into the blues. He married folk singer Marie Courcelle, with whom he recorded four albums during the eighties. After those years, Herzhaft dedicated himself exclusively to blues music, and in 1993, under the name Herzhaft Blues, he released the album "Never Been Plugged", (the first of a series of three albums), after which he toured North America. His first solo album was released in 2002, titled "Ghost Cities", a work that definitively opened the doors for him into the European blues circuit.
We are looking at a global artist, complete and with a musical background like few others in Europe. At 77, he continues to be a bluesman with his latest album Roots & B4, twelve original tracks that showcase the old troubadour in a state of maximum contentment—calm and exuberant. A true pleasure to listen to.