B.B. King does fans a "Favor" with new CD

The bluesman's latest album is part throwback, part twist. At 82, King is considering his past; the album release anticipates the Sept. 10 opening of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, Miss., where he grew up. The songs on "One Kind Favor" were current when King's career got under way in the 1940s and 1950s, among them "Sitting on Top of the World" and lesser-known gems like "Get These Blues Off Me" from T-Bone Walker. The performance, recorded live in the studio, might almost be a late set at a very attentive club.

In a realistic stereo image, the band stays in one position, with the pianist on the left, the drummer just off center and a suavely deployed horn section on the right. Clearly spotlighted up front, never having to strain, is King himself, addressing the blues eternals of love, hard times and death — sometimes all three, as in Howlin' Wolf's "How Many More Years." The album's title is in the lyrics of its final song: "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean."

"One Kind Favor" was produced by T Bone Burnett, who has lately been cultivating the death-haunted sides of rockers like John Mellencamp and Robert Plant. King isn't gloomy about mortality. His voice reveals sorrow, then fights it off with raspy shouts, while his guitar is his modest but indomitable ally, with its finely focused tone and its terse, targeted phrases.

Burnett did not produce a casual club set. The pianist is Dr. John, who — bolstered by Jim Keltner on drums — regularly rolls King's Mississippi-Memphis blues toward New Orleans, especially with the second-line beat of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." Blues scholars could parse King's deliberate homages to and divergences from models such as Walker, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The album's pristinely remodeled ambience is no more a purely vintage style than the stereo (rather than mono) recording is. But the ache, the anger, the elegance and the edge of King's blues are undiminished and authentic.

— Jon Pareles, New York Times

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— Shane Harrison

COMING NEXT TUESDAY

New albums from Rodney Crowell, Lila Downs, Michael Feinstein, Donnie Klang, New Kids on the Block, Marie Osmond, the Smithereens, Vonda Shepard, Chris Tomlin, Underoath, Brian Wilson and Young Jeezy.