Time Is on B.B. King’s Side : Folksy, Gracious Bluesman Defies the Years, Honors Late Greats in Santa Ana Concert

All this rain can lead to morbid thoughts. So can the recent mortality rate for beloved and influential performing artists.

Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev died on the same day, just over a week ago. It was hard not to think of them as B.B. King arrived in Orange County Tuesday night, his personal clock reading 67 years and ticking. Anticipating the show, one couldn’t help having the gloomy thought creep in that King is another front-page obituary waiting to happen.

One also couldn’t help thinking about Albert King, B.B.’s fellow bluesman and fellow townsman (though not a relative) from Indianola, Miss. Albert, only two years B.B.’s senior, died Dec. 21, eight days after playing the last concert of his life at the Rhythm Cafe in Santa Ana--the same stage where B.B. arrived after another day of rain.

Even under customary California sunshine, and even during months when the front page is filled only with the usual bad news and not tidings of great artists dying, there’s a certain dismal accounting that takes place when esteemed performers have reached a certain age.

With excellent musicians in their youth or middle years, the only question is whether they’ll have a good night or a bad one, whether they’ll show passion and inspiration, or a lack of energy and spark.

If the verdict is bad, you write it off as just a bad night, and hope for better next time. When the calendar reads 67, the stakes seem higher. Instead of a routine aesthetic judgment, a review becomes a palm reading with an eye on the life line. A bad night isn’t a bad night. It’s a sign of diminished powers. A good night reassures you that time is being held at bay. But for how long?

Well, never mind for how long.

The important thing about B.B. King’s early show Tuesday was that time was held at bay for the 75 minutes he was on stage. Who knows what’s going to happen to him next month or next year or next century? Who knows what’s going to happen to the rest of us who were there? At least for a while, we could forget bad news and bad weather, and enjoy a performer capable of setting aside gloom for a while and replacing it with pleasure.

King was fully himself, and it’s an expansive self. He was gracious and amusing, folksy and regal. His broad, pliant face was in constant motion, forming expressions of pleasure or concentration in keeping with the music’s flow. Most of all, he was in command of a varied and definitive blues repertoire that has been well-documented in the recent, 77-song boxed CD set, “King of the Blues.”

King sang with plenty of power, riding easily over his horn-driven band. There was some extra huskiness in his voice, the only sign of intruding age. For a man of large girth, he moved easily and nimbly, sort of like Jackie Gleason, though not quite so balletic or histrionic.

King played a lot of guitar, with unflagging force or finesse, as the moment dictated. At one point in a fine version of his dire classic, “The Thrill Is Gone,” King chopped out a sharp-edged chord that sounded like the blow that causes the wound, then slid into a down-the-neck groan that sounded like the first pulsation of pain shooting from the gash.

But the mood was mostly light. Leading into “Darlin’ You Know I Love You,” King summoned soft, sweet sustained notes, thickened with his distinctive vibrato tone. His playing, which underscored the melody’s passing kinship to “Georgia on My Mind,” drew a big smile from rhythm guitarist Leon Warren, a talented, veteran player whose furrowed brow and typically heavy-lidded, impassive look leads one to suspect he doesn’t grin often.

Few band leaders interact more closely with their players than King does with his impeccably sharp, eight-man unit. There was a good deal of clowning, including some slapstick dancing and other byplay, but there also was an element of ritual: Most solos by band members--and King gave them all room to show off--ended with vassal-and-lord bowing deeply to each other in a show of mutual respect and appreciation.

King was just as gracious with an audience that rewarded him with a standing ovation before he had played or sung a note. In a long finale that sandwiched much funky band vamping around a surging “When Love Comes to Town,” King walked the stage apron, shaking hands, bestowing autographs on LP covers and menus that were thrust his way, and getting bussed by a woman who leaped on stage.

Finally, with the slow flourishes of a monarch bestowing gifts on his subjects, King tossed guitar picks, then a gold chain and lapel pin he’d been wearing, to the audience. All the while, saxophonist Melvin Jackson kept up a yelping, manic fanfare of praise in a voice that was part Flavor Flav, part Speedy Gonzalez, and part Van Earl Wright: “B-B-B-Bee . . . the one and only B.B. King . . . Go hey, go hey, go hey!”

(King also exercised a royal prerogative to show mild displeasure when he didn’t get everything he wanted: After seeking rhythmic clapping during “Caldonia,” only to have the audience hold back, he dismissed the effort, saying, “That’s enough, I don’t want to wear you out.”)

That long, antic ending was a bookend to a long, lighthearted beginning. As King alternated slow blues with such up-tempo songs as the obligatory opener, “Let the Good Times Roll,” even nominally sad ballads were played for comic effect (way overplayed, in the case of a medley of “Nobody Loves Me but my Mother” and “How Blue Can You Get?” that found King blubbering with feigned, tearful woe).

But King and his band found a pocket of seriousness during an extended segment played with leader and band seated (“because we’re seated doesn’t mean we’re tired--we’re not,” King insisted. With Eric Clapton having recently struck multi-platinum sitting down, chairs can safely be taken to mean laid back, rather than enfeebled. And if King was husbanding his energy, he could be forgiven on a night when he had two shows to play.)

As it turned out, mortality was on King’s mind, too.

The set reached its emotional peak in a series of songs that included a blues threnody that King introduced as a memorial to “so many of my friends that (have) passed on.” He recited a roll call of Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, then mused further: “When I do pass on, if I can catch up with them and they’ll let me in the band, we’ll have a heck of a band. . . . (But) I’m not ready to join them yet.”

The instrumental piece that followed featured King’s liquid, tear-soaked guitar crying against a dramatic backdrop of sonorous, funereal horns. He followed with his most sincere ballad of the set, “Please Accept my Love.” The plaintive song incorporated a brief burst of falsetto pleading as King moved toward its closing declaration, “If you should die before I do, I’ll end my life to be with you.”

Then came the show’s highlight, “The Thrill Is Gone,” in which, the romance having shattered, King recanted the previous song’s suicide pact and faced grim reality: “I’ll still live on, but so lonely I’ll be.” King’s singing on the verse, “I’m free, free, free / Free from your spell,” hit with the shattering force of a close bond torn apart.

With the death of Albert King, only John Lee Hooker has seniority over B.B. King on the list of blues guitar greats. Hooker, 75, has been riding a crest the past few years with a series of good and popular recordings. That gives B.B., whose last studio album, the 1991 release, “There is Always One More Time,” was his best in many years, something to shoot for. Again, as Jim Morrison sang (prophetically, in his own case), “The future’s uncertain, and the end is always near.” But King, at 67, still has the vitality to make you forget for a while about bleak weather, sad headlines, and the passing time.

A.J. Croce--yes, he’s Jim Croce’s son--is a very young man whose opening set showed a good feel for very old R & B, much of it emanating from down N’awlins way. Croce’s boogie-woogie and stride piano workouts were energetic, if not quite rollicking or stunningly inventive. But his five-piece supporting band, including a smart, punchy, two-man horn section, made the half-hour set a lively workout that often sounded as if Croce, 21, had created a miniature version of the jumping horn band, Roomful of Blues.

Croce’s singing was raspy enough to bring Louis Armstrong to mind. One hopes it’s at least partly an affected rasp, because more dimension and variety in delivery would have helped him establish a more conversational tone with his singing--something that’s needed if he’s going to get across the humor in obscure nuggets he introduced from such sources as Louis Prima and Memphis Minnie.

It’s not easy to project that sort of personality from behind a grand piano, and Croce has a way to go. Nevertheless, he and his band were immediately likable. Before he delved into his collection of musical antiques, Croce served up a few solid originals, including the set’s highlight, a sorrowful soul-blues ballad, “Keep on Lookin.’ ”