2024-07-24 05:33:08
Chosen. In Christianity it means Jesus, in Hollywood it means Harry Potter or the hero of the sci-fi series The Matrix. But when the music magazine Rolling Stone put that word in the headline in 2013, it meant Gary Clark Jr. A young American guitarist and singer who was supposedly destined to save the blues.
Of course, he had the prerequisites. Extraordinary talent. Rocket launch. And success in the charts. But Gary Clark Jr didn’t just want to do blues back then. He confirmed it again this Wednesday, when he played an excellent yet over-the-top concert on the second biggest stage of the Colors of Ostrava festival. Quite adequate for the broad dispersion of the forty-year-old who received his four Grammys in the blues, rock and R&B categories.
Clark comes from the Texas city of Austin, where as a thirteen-year-old he received a guitar for Christmas from his father, an auto mechanic. He was self-taught and quickly developed considerable talent. When the famous Eric Clapton invited him to the Crossroads guitar festival in 2010, he shot him to fame. “Everyone there was crazy about him. Already during his performance, I started getting text messages, what is this guy,” the organizer described to the Washington Post.
Two years later, Clark debuted on the Warner Records label with the album Blak and Blu, which dominated the blues charts, but also reached number six on the pop chart. Even then, it was a carefully chosen mix: guitar-heavy enough to attract attention in the blues world, but at the same time attractive to fans of rock, soul or funk. Since then, the musician has only been expanding his scope. He was a guest on the records of the Foo Fighters, the singer Alicia Keys and this year the guitarist Slash. He is repeatedly invited to the stage by the Rolling Stones, with whose frontman Mick Jagger he also performed at the White House in 2012. He appears on the covers of music magazines, but at the same time he contributed to the soundtrack of the superhero film Justice League or the animated Pixar Cars 3.
He occasionally steps in front of the camera himself, for example, portraying blues guitarist Arthur Crudup in the 2022 biopic Elvis. And when he released an album this year, he introduced it on the popular TV talk shows of Jimmy Fallon and Jon Stewart, not to mention a nearly three-hour interview on The Joe Rogan Experience. which, despite many controversies, was again the world’s most listened-to podcast on the Spotify platform last year.
It doesn’t fit in boxes
A step away from electric blues, respectively blues-rock, brought Clark popularity. At the same time, however, he admits that the publishing house still doesn’t know how to deal with him to this day.
Gary Clark Jr is an extraordinarily gifted guitarist. | Photo: Jiří Zerzoň
“They say they don’t have a place to put me. That I don’t fit into boxes. That they have no idea how to promote a slightly messed-up kid who plays power chords and listens to Nirvana but also loves Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, but other than that, they think Thelonious Monk was one of the greatest dudes in the world, and most of all he wishes he could play harmonica like Sonny Boy Williamson. paraphrases Clark on Rogan’s podcast. And he immediately adds that he never wanted to choose just one thing.
His concert at Colors is similarly unclassifiable. The bearded guitarist comes on stage wearing a light-colored hat, with a gold chain around his neck, and during the hour-long concert he combines rock, blues, soul, but also hip-hop, sometimes R&B and funk like from the 70s of the last century, sporadically with a touch of jazz or gospel. At the same time, the opening song of the evening with the Arabic name Maktub is based on a hypnotic riff like from the desert blues of bands like Tinariwen.
In short, Gary Clark Jr borrows from everything, while nothing clearly dominates. The blues base reveals when he pulls the strings with a beautiful tone on the guitar, or songs with a distinct riff like the three-chord When My Train Pulls In.
In addition to two songs, it includes only new items from the current album called JPEG RAW, the first after a five-year break. He colors the song What About the Children, which he recorded with Stevie Wonder, more into funk. In the track This is Who We Are, on the other hand, the guitarist almost raps. After which, during the crawler Alone Together, he puts the instrument down completely, walks around the stage with a microphone and sings falsetto a bit like Prince or Curtis Mayfield, although not nearly as interesting.
Gary Clark Jr performed on the second biggest stage of Colors of Ostrava. | Photo: Jiří Zerzoň
He rarely speaks to the audience and always repeats that he came from Texas. It’s also where all the members of his excellent band were born or live: eccentrically dressed second guitarist Eric Zapata, keyboardist Dayne Reliford, drummer JJ Johnson, bassist Elijah Ford and the three female vocalists, Clark’s sisters Shawn, Savannah and Shanan.
The guitarist himself lives in Austin, about half an hour’s drive from where he grew up. A few years ago, he and his wife, an Australian model, bought a ranch there. There, Gary Clark Jr. breathes life into situations where it is too much for him. He described to the Washington Post how in 2018 something picked him up and angrily hit the sideboard with his right hand so hard that he subsequently had to fly to New York and undergo a specialized surgical procedure. “I was frustrated,” he reasoned without elaborating.
Rattlesnake in the garage
According to him, he experienced another wave of anxiety during the pandemic. And after her, the new thing he does now is turn off his phone for several days and camp in the forest. Or he sits on the ranch and takes pictures of birds – for example, he lives there raptors called the southern karancho. The wife, on the other hand, recently almost ran over a rattlesnake while parking in the garage.
“Then one time my son and I were watching chickens in the garden, when a hawk suddenly flies in, grabs one, and immediately it’s gone again. And this daughter was playing by the river with a child’s fishing rod and accidentally picked up a highly poisonous water snake,” he described in Rogan’s podcast how life on the ranch inspires him.
Maybe some of the feelings it evokes in him, Gary Clark Jr shows through music. In the end, a strongly emotional guitar tone appears as the biggest constant of his changing concert at Colors.
The musician, who at first imitated classics from Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan to Buddy Guy, today works a lot with drawing sound. It has a retro feel almost like Jack White in places. He often turns on fuzz, wah-wah or overdrive effects from the pedals. During the course of an hour, he repeatedly changes guitars, playing even those modified especially for him by the instrument manufacturer Bill Asher or the company Wide Sky.
Compared to older records or concert recordings, Clark holds back a bit, softening even loud rock songs like When My Train Pulls In live in Ostrava by inserting reggae. He hides the powerful dynamic crescendo until the final, detailed and well-composed composition Habits. It begins with a finger-picked guitar melody with a wonderfully soft sound, continues with a faster passage where the female vocalists answer the guitarist as in a black church, and ends with a euphoric catharsis. At that moment, Clark’s guitar oozes those emotions ecstatically.
Video: Habits by Gary Clark Jr
Gary Clark Jr’s concert at the Colors of Ostrava festival culminated with the composition Habits. Photo: Jiří Zerzoň | Video: Veeps.com