Mia Borders

"This hat is the only thing keeping me from passing out," Mia Borders announced mid-way through her early-afternoon Thursday set at the New Orleans Jazz Fest's Gentilly Stage. The white fedora was also key to her look, a studiously casual ensemble of tight jeans, tight white T-shirt and omnipresent shades.

The blues/rock/soul songs that Borders and her five-man band knocked out were equally casual yet studious. At her weekly gig at Irvin Mayfield's I Club and at other venues, she has in the last few years come into her own in her native New Orleans as a songwriter, singer and frontperson, confident in all three roles. In mid-April, she released "Wherever There Is," which she considers to be her first full-length, full-blown album.

"She Don't Know," a cut from her 2010 release "Magnolia Blue," was curt slab of mid-tempo blues built of a love triangle that has only just revealed itself. Elsewhere, Hammond B3 organ and a big kick drum factored prominently in the mix. Borders confined herself to rhythm guitar; she left the soloing to Takeshi Shimmura. Shimmura made judicious use of a wah-wah pedal, never over-playing or showboating. He maintained a consistently rich, deep-hued tone, carving scalpel-like lines. 

Love and lust are woven throughout Borders' lyrics. She dedicated "You I Adore" to "someone so special, I don't have to say." Over Shimmura's wah-wah guitar, she progressed from a rapper's cadence, to a delicate falsetto, to an anguished cry of "I can give you something I see you really need." She sounded like she meant it.

And who knew George Michael's acoustic guitar-anchored "Faith" could translate as a mid-tempo blues-rock stomp? Borders certainly did. She and her band arranged an un-ironic "Faith." Before the final "you gotta have faith," Borders held out a dramatic pause that involved taking a long slug from a can of beer.

Yet another gesture that was both calculated and cool.