2023-11-03 23:26:11
There are guys to whom imminent old age comes early. It usually happens when someone younger comes to do the same thing they do and does it better, or so they think, although nothing later indicates that this is the case. They are false perceptions caused by insecurity; The old man is distrustful of anything that smells young.
It happened with Camarón, when the blonde gypsy faced the flamenco monarch, Manolo Caracol, in the quarterfinals. “A blonde gypsy cannot sing well,” Caracol seems to have said when the young Camarón crossed the threshold of his teacher’s pain with his voice. And it also happened in Kinshasa (Zaire), in the middle of Africa, when Muhammad Ali and George Foreman faced each other for the world heavyweight title in October 1974. Weeks before, for three days, from September 22 to 24, He put on a music festival with a handful of artists on the bill, including James Brown and BB King. Initially, the festival was going to coincide with the boxing evening, but in the end the fight was delayed due to an injury to Foreman.
So, at dawn, with a heat that made their bodies sweat, Ali and Foreman performed their animal dance until the eighth round, which was when Ali knocked down Foreman with a right hand and, with it, became world weight champion. heavy. A legendary fight where spectators shouted Ali bumaye (Ali, kill him) and about which Norman Mailer wrote an even more legendary report, titled The Fight; a foundational work that continues to be studied today in journalism schools around the world. In Spanish it was reissued a few years ago with the title El combat (Contra).
Mailer’s disciple and journalist Daniel de Visé uses Foreman’s defeat as a metaphor to identify BB King with Ali and Foreman with James Brown. He does so in the biography of BB King recently published by Kultrum, a gallery of mirrors that takes us to the Kinshasa festival, where the soul of James Brown was defeated against a BB King victorious with his haute couture blues.
It should be noted that BB King was older than James Brown, but he behaved as if he were younger, attacking each song with an energy and enthusiasm typical of a kid wanting to win the scene. De Visé’s book is neither missing nor wasted; It tells us the rise and reign, as the subtitle says, of a guy who grew up on the banks of the Mississippi, burning the liturgy of blackness on each of the six strings of his guitar.
More than fifteen thousand concerts in ninety countries over sixty years, those are the approximate numbers, since the accounts never worked out for BB King. He was generous and wasted in abundance. Raimundo Amador remembers that every time they saw each other, BB King gave dollars to the children as if they were candy. “It brings luck,” he said. The elegance of his sound, the sad bite of the blues and the shadow nailed to the floor of a guitar named Lucille, all that and more appears in a book that can be heard. It is titled BB King, king of the blues, and is translated by Iñigo García Ureta.
While I have been reading it, I have been listening to the recordings that I treasured in the back of the closet. Of all of them I keep two, one is the one in question, the one from the Kinshasa festival, on VHS, and another is the one from the Chicago prison, a vinyl recorded shortly before, where BB King’s guitar pierces the walls of the prison and makes the bars vibrate.
#Alas #Alas