Jeff Healey And The Jazz Wizards - Beautiful Noise (2010)

To the layman like myself, Jeff Healey was known primarily as a blues guitarist. He grew up in Toronto and was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, and had his eyes surgically removed before his first birthday. Despite this, he managed to carve out a niche for himself in blues, and even helped parlay the praise of his debut album "See the Light" into a speaking role in the 1989 cult classic Road House. But there was far more substance to Healey's music and passion for it than many of us realize.
First and foremost, while he was primarily a blues musician, he was not exclusively one. A little more than a decade after reaching the peak of his success, he had switched over to making jazz records, playing guitar and trumpet on many of the songs and the type of jazz he was playing had a lot of Dixieland elements in it, with a tinge of ragtime tossed in here and there.
He'd gotten so comfortable playing the music that he would tour frequently as a jazz act and sit in on local jazz gigs in the Toronto area where he was born and spent his time off the road. This particular concert was recorded in January 2006 at Toronto's Berkeley Church.