Virtually every attempt to update the style of recordings of the great blues artists has been horribly misconceived. Chuck Berry playing with the Steve Miller Band, Wolf and Muddy being forced to record with idiot hard rock bands, Otis Rush and Freddie King having to bear the weight of arrangements and production imposed on their music instead of coming out of it–none of these sessions has been worth the time, effort and money that went into them.
Only B.B. King has stood above this aesthetic debauchery. He has refused to make the choice between either a wholesale update of his style or a museum hall display of his past achievements. With the assistance of his young producer, Bill
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Szymczyk, he has found an attractive middle ground in which he has continued to grow artistically without giving up any of the body and soul that made his music so great in the first place. The positive results of this collaboration have been documented on his last three albums.
Live and Well and Completely Well were both adventurous albums, with the latter being the better of the two. But it was on Indianola Mississippi Seeds that the producer and the artist found their rightful groove. The sound was modern, the back-up, by the L.A. musicians who did Sweet Baby James, were equal to King in every respect, and the material, while still essentially blues, was a different sort of blues: B.B. King's blues, 1971.
"Ain't Gonna Worry My Life Anymore" summed up all the virtues of the King-Szymczyk collaboration. By my ears it contained the following: great B.B. King guitar, as smooth and as fluid as anything he has ever done; great rhythm by drummer Russ Kunkel, and as an extra bonus, a great drum break; one great piano solo by Carole King, one great string arrangement by Jimmie Haskell, great sound and mix all the way through, and a fabulous vocal. By all odds the best cut on one of last year's finest albums.
Of course, when an artist who was outstanding during one period continues to grow into other musical styles and tastes, he is inevitably subjected to criticism from people who want to keep him on some sort of historical pedestal, as if he could only maintain his integrity by playing his early masterpieces over and over, for as long as he performs. Peter Bogdanovich was recently moved to say about Orson Welles that everyone is so busy worshiping his past successes, they have forgotten the man is still alive and still creating. And so it is that we get people writing that "B.B. King is in deep trouble," that he has become sharp and slick, that he uses strings on his records, as if this was somehow in and of itself a criticism of his music. And no matter how intelligently such criticism is put, it amounts to trying to keep King in his historical place.
As B.B. himself recently put it in an interview in the LA Free Press: "There are people who think that if you're a blues singer you should always be in
