I've been seeing Albert King on PBS a lot recently, playing with Stevie Ray Vaughan for the television series known as In Session (1983), and it's just great. Albert King is rarely given the respect that he deserves by the media (although that's not the case among musicians), so I'll make a simple statement here. No blues guitarist has been more influential on the generation of blues-rockers to follow. His time-feel, vocabulary, attack and pitch control have been studied and emulated by Hendrix, Clapton, Vaughan and many, many others. I'm not saying that B.B. (no relation) and Robert Johnson weren't as important - they were - but not more. And it's astonishing to realize that, like Hendrix, he was left-handed and played a right-handed guitar upside down. But unlike Hendrix, he didn't re-string it! You can see it clearly in this video from the show mentioned above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odemgv5eLok&feature=related. And here's "Born Under a Bad Sign", from the album of the same name recorded with the formidable Booker T. and the M.G.'s in 1967: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-f3XipcBqA&feature=related.

I'm always amazed by how the blues, a seemingly simple form, can produce so much music of complete originality. Reduced to its basics, it contains three chords and a five-note scale. But that's not it at all, of course. The blues is a concept: a study in contrasts in terms of harmony, rhythm, tone, emotional content and attitude - all of it held together by its deceptively straightforward form. And, as I've mentioned before, the restrictions that an artist places on him or herself actually (paradoxically) lead to freedom. Robert Frost once said that writing free-verse poetry (i.e. without restrictions) was like "playing tennis without a net". And the same can be done in music.

Of all the artists that have explored the blues form, very few have gone as far as Eric Clapton. In the days ahead, I'm going to re-listen to several of his great albums from the past as well as his brand new one called, Clapton (2010), and write about the experience in this space shortly. For now, here's the opening track, a version of Melvin Jackson's "Travelin' Alone", with a melody that led to me writing the first sentence above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xgaWpQojMI