The blues of guitarist Albert King shines with a keening, metallic glint. He builds solos like a welder, carefully measuring each phrase for its shading and intensity, then laying another atop or alongside it, often with unexpected drops and variations in tone and timbre, all the while working toward the inevitable climax. He dangles the idea of that climax tantalizingly in front of you as the solo snakes its way through various false starts and side trips, until finally he decides he’s said what he has to say and concludes abruptly, topping everything off with a signature flourish. He then turns disdainfully away from his sidemen and exchanges a few words with the audience or puffs imperiously on his pipe as the band works to keep up with the standards he’s set. Once in a while, he even allows himself to look pleased.
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It’s no accident that one of King’s most popular recordings extols the labors of an assembly-line auto worker. Everything about the man and his music–his physical brawn and stolid elegance, the relentlessly craftsmanlike logic of his leads, even his glowering, fierce persona–evokes the proletarian roots of the blues. When he smooths things out and croons “The Very Thought of You” in his dusky vibrato, the smoldering emotion beneath the surface makes the song’s tenderness all the more riveting.
This particular evening, King was hoarse; only occasionally did he summon his patented bull roar on up-tempo blues, and he didn’t attempt any ballads at all. But despite the rasp of his voice and the nearly inevitable tension with musicians and sound crew, the genius of his music shone clearly. One of the most distinctive things about King’s improvisations is his tendency to think in terms of swooping down to grab sounds and ideas, rather than the usual straining upward. When King bends strings, the melody line slithers down like a wire gone temporarily flaccid; then he snaps everything taut by clustering notes between the drawn-out phrases he uses to bridge his ideas. Most guitarists sound as if they’re stretching their solos to new, agonizing heights when they bend notes; King has an uncanny knack of seeming to pull the entire solo toward him, like sheet metal being smoothed out, to make it more pliable to his demands.
“Travelin’ to California,” another King standard, continued in the same vein, as he spit fire into fierce notes accented with blistering shards of feedback, a flirt with distortion, and finally an onslaught that approximated a wall of sound but sizzled with undulating lava streams. He cooled it off with a finish that still glistened but was no longer scalding, and a final zip down the fretboard served as an exclamation point. King’s eyes glittered as he allowed himself a satisfied smile (or was it a smirk?) and left most of the rest of the song to the others.
