B.B. King, "One Kind Favor" (2008)

NICK DERISO: He didn't have to do this.

Didn't have to experiment with hipster roots producer T. Bone Burnett, New Orleans pianist Dr. John and others on the superlative "One Kind Favor." Didn't have to get off a never-ending love-in tour that seems to draw continuous sellouts of enraptured fans -- all perfectly satisfied to be the how-many-ever-millionth customer to sing along with "The Thrill is Gone."

B.B. King could have done what most guys his age are doing nowadays: Put out an overhyped, but essentially soul-free album of duets featuring a head-scratching phalanx of with-it stars like, I don't know, Kid Rock and Jessica Simpson, then run a rut to the check-cashing place.

Instead, King opened himself up creatively and, in some ways, even musically (since he's always been more known for a polished, citified sophistication) in the still-stirring autumn of his justly legendary career. This record is like a trip to the bottom of a popping 1950s pot of country-cooked dirty rice, familiar yet complex.

"One Kind Favor" opens with a song that, in anybody else's hands, playing with any other producer, might have been a sad valedictory: Here, however, Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" shuffles in as a quick-step admonition: King -- who turns 83 on Tuesday -- recognizes his mortality, and he's going to have a knee-slapping hootenanny in the meantime.

"I'm not going anytime soon," he welps, "but when the day comes, don't forget me."

That sets the tone on an direct and unpretentious set dominated by blues musicians from his gritty Mississippi youth, some familiar (Big Bill Broonzy, doomed genius Robert Johnson), some less so (John Willie "Shifty" Henry, Lee Vida Walker). King isn't nostalgic, though, so much as celebratory. Reexamining their music gives new life to his own, too.

There is inside his mournful then cool-rocking take on Leroy Carr's "Blues Before Sunrise" (incorrectly credited here to John Lee Hooker) a reclamation of King's rightful place not simply as ambassador for this music, but as its greatest living interpreter.

Without the window dressing that so often obscures artists of his vintage these days, B.B. King's shattering vibrato (both as a singer and a guitarist) provides honest answers and lasting resolve for a musical world sometimes gone awfully wrong.

Listeners have responded: "One Kind Favor" debuted at the top of Billboard magazine's blues music charts, of course -- but also entered the magazine's Top 200 at No. 37, as well. That is King's highest mainstream chart position since the celebrated "Live In Cook County Jail" hit No. 25 in 1971.

We can't answer the question of "How Many More Years," posed here in the old Howlin' Wolf tune. You're reminded of King's frailty again and again in this uncluttered studio atmosphere, which lays bare vocals that sometimes can't pull off the winking bark of his biggest old tunes. But that's part of the brave magic of "One Kind Favor," too: We hear B.B. King as he is, not as some pre-packaged version of a Venerable Old Blues Musician.

Whatever he has lost as a singer, and it's not much, there is still a deep well of emotion in King's guitar playing. From clever, crystalline licks on the Mississippi Sheiks' "Sitting on Top of the World" to a captivating take on Lonnie Johnson's "My Love Is Down," King argues for his lasting relevance with each stinging pluck.

And we listen, enraptured. No, B.B. King didn't have to take this chance. But, thankfully, he did.



Purchase: B.B. King - One Kind Favor