POP MUSIC REVIEW : Late-Night Blues in Midday Sun at Long Beach

Solomon Burke’s set at the 10th annual Long Beach Blues Festival on Sunday was a textbook example of how the intangibles in music can make or break a performance.

All the elements were in place for a major event. Burke, who has focused on gospel music for years, was performing (for the first time in 20 years in Los Angeles) the late ‘50s/early ‘60s R&B; hits like “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and “Got to Get You Off of My Mind” that made him one of the founding fathers of soul.

The 300-pound singer was backed by an equally massive band of about two dozen, including a dozen horn players. With Burke’s impeccable sense of phrasing and formidable powerful voice in top form, the arrangements were honed to a fine edge and the audience seemed poised to respond to Burke’s animated exhortations.

And yet somehow the music and audience connected only sporadically. Maybe it was the rushed tempos or the inherent difficulties of trying to put across a set heavy on soul ballads that dealt with intensely emotional, private themes in the mid-afternoon sun. At a club or concert hall with a spotlight focused on his dynamic stage preaching, Burke’s performance would probably have been doubly effective.

But he was the only artist during the two-day event on the Cal State Long Beach campus affected by the festival setting. The mellow, late-night blues style of Charles Brown sounded as good in daylight hours as the exuberant zydeco of Terrance Simien and the Mallet Playboys. It wasn’t too incongruous to hear Brown closing his set by crooning “Merry Christmas, Baby” in mid-September, or Koko Taylor inducing the audience to sing “all night long” during “Wang Dang Doodle” at 3 in the afternoon.

But that’s par for the course for the Long Beach Blues Festival--even those who customarily loathe outdoor music events seem to enjoy it. The festival’s atmosphere of picnic baskets, blankets and lawn chairs spread across the full expanse of a football field gives it the low-keyed ambience of an overgrown family picnic with about 10,000 people taking part.

John Lee Hooker’s 45-minute headlining set didn’t break any new ground but the veteran boogie man’s mere presence was enough to satisfy the crowd. He was in feisty form, injecting snatches of his raucous Delta blues guitar into the arrangements of his smooth, seven-piece backing band and unexpectedly prowling the stage during his set-closing number.

Rather than focusing on material from his new album, “The Healer,” Hooker--who appears at the Palace Thursday--tossed in such moody chestnuts as “Serve You Right to Suffer.” His set provided a suitably low-key finale for the event, aided by lead guitarist Michael Osborn’s skill at splitting the difference between Albert King’s salty, stinging tone and Peter Green’s low-volume melodism.

Chicago blues queen Taylor, who battled hoarseness to deliver a consistently appealing set marked by lean, funky arrangements, was one surprise earlier in the day. But a bigger one was a report that this might be the final blues festival held on the Cal State Long Beach campus. Hard to fathom--maybe they just don’t realize what a unique, enjoyable event this is.