After seeing Stevie Ray Vaughan perform at Darien Lake, a teenage Tommy Z stopped at a Burger King on the drive home and found Vaughan standing beside him at the counter. Tommy introduced himself, congratulated his hero on getting sober and immediately started asking about pickups, pedals and guitars. The practical nature of that exchange says plenty. He wanted the magic, certainly, yet he also wanted the wiring diagram.

Four decades of blues followed. Tommy Z toured with Pinetop Perkins, shared stages with Buddy Guy, worked with Benny Turner and earned a place in the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. His records Blizzard of Blues and Plug In and Play reached the Billboard Blues Albums Top 10, while years spent writing and producing for film and television expanded his work far beyond the stage. Through every change in role, the guitar remained the centre of the argument. Due October 23 through South Blossom Records, Tommy Z Is Live in Colombia captures a concert at Teatro Santander in Bucaramanga and places the musician before an audience eager to answer him at full volume. The album arrives with the accumulated history of a player who has spent most of his life studying where the blues came from while continuing to test where his own voice belongs inside it. Ahead of its release, we spoke with Tommy Z about survival, sobriety, space between notes, the business surrounding the music and the originality he still pursues each morning.

photo by Michael Lee Jackson

Hi Tommy, it’s great to speak with you. The decision to stay home with your guitar spared you from the crash that killed George and your other friends. Decades later, has the instrument ever carried a sense of duty toward them?

Great to speak with you as well. The sense of duty I have is to keep doing this, to keep honoring the gift of music and the journey I have been blessed to have.  Staying fit and sober and not abusing these gifts is part of that. That’s one thing about Stevie Ray Vaughan’s legacy that those of us from that era learned from him. 

A forty-year career in blues requires booking shows, signing deals, promoting records and keeping the whole operation moving. You have also said that money provides a poor reason to enter music. Which business decision has cost you the most sleep?

At this point after all these years and the situations that come with it, I don’t know that the business costs me sleep. I will submit a caveat to the wise, that unless otherwise stated, when you get married, any songs you write become co-mingled intellectual property. If something happens like a divorce, those are fair game even if your partner didn’t have anything to do with creating them. 

I love that Tommy Z Is Live in Colombia exists because you casually asked the engineers to record the show during soundcheck. Had you known the concert would become an album, what would you have changed onstage? 

I think the main thing I would have changed was having direct room mics out in the audience vs. the stage mics I had to use and gain up to hear them. But in the end I think they were captured more than adequately. I also would have made some personnel changes, possibly had some special guests or horns. 

The Bucaramanga audience responds with the excitement of people making their own discovery rather than politely receiving a familiar artist. What did they hear in your music that American audiences may have grown accustomed to? 

In Colombia and some of these places I’ve played over the years I experienced in my own small way what it must have been like for the progenitors of rock-n-roll in the 1950’s. The rhythms and music are primal, raw, yet refined somewhat in 2026 but it has a sex appeal to it. It’s different but not unlike Latin music to that effect but it’s still just as accessible, only not as familiar to them.

During your Colombian tours, the days belonged to masterclasses and the nights to concerts. Students can occasionally expose a musician’s habits with one innocent question. Which question from a Colombian student sent you back to the guitar with homework?

I don’t know that this happened but there was a moment I remember where I was talking to a student after the class and something told me to reach into my pocket and give him a guitar pick and he was so surprised and happy he said he would never forget me as long as he lived. 

On Dónde Está La Fiesta, the crowd shouts “Bucaramanga” directly into the groove and briefly takes possession of the song. At what moment did it become their performance too? 

When you listen to the whole album from the beginning with “Pumpin,’” you realize that it was their performance also right from the start. 

Your teenage years began with speed, precision and players such as Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen, before B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan pulled your attention elsewhere. Which technical habit took the longest to unlearn?

Playing all the time, trying to fill every space on every beat. I remember when it clicked. It was in the middle of a song on my first live album. We were playing Jimmy Smith’s “Back at the Chicken Shack.” This song was what Pinetop Perkins used to open his shows with. As soon as my guitar solo started, I started getting a sense of leaving space, letting it breathe and it’s stayed with me since. 

Where exactly is home for the blues in 2026?

Well for a long time it was considered the Devil’s music. Originally that song was addressing an idea told from God’s perspective that music had wandered too far away from the church. It had become profanity laden, with obscenity, gratuitous sexuality, ultra-darkness, you name it. Geographically the cities from New Orleans up the Mississippi, Memphis to Chicago are still hubs for it. But hey here in Buffalo we’ve got blizzards and sports teams that have never won a league championship, too lol. Metaphysically I’ll take something Freddie King’s brother Benny told me, that blues is the music of oppressed people.  So wherever you have oppression, home is in the hearts and souls of oppressed people anywhere. 

You toured with Pinetop Perkins, a musician who carried living history into every room he entered. What did he do onstage that only made sense to you years later?

That was an incredible time period, and getting to know him and play with him was wonderful. I knew he was Muddy Waters’ piano player and in The Blues Brothers movie. I didn’t know at the time that he was instrumental, no pun intended in influencing rock and rock itself. What is considered the first rock and rock song is “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston, but it was Ike Turner on piano there and when asked about it, Turner said he just played what Pinetop showed him. I have some Pinetop stories that are pretty heavy too and maybe I’ll be sharing some of them in the near future. 

When you pick up the guitar alone the following morning, what are you still chasing?

I am still chasing that Holy Grail thing of identifiability and originality. Listen to Clapton, SRV, Buddy Guy, B.B., Freddie, Albert; they all sound like themselves. I know that I sound a certain way and do some things that maybe some other players don’t do but I’m not a B.B. King playing one note and knowing it’s him level of it. I also would love to write some music that makes me feel like Chris Stapleton makes people feel.