B.B. King Unites Old, New at Blues Festival

B.B. King concerts these days have a warm and easygoing quality, especially after he dismisses his horn section and settles down with his rhythm section to explore a long medley of blues. If, at 74, he is not as physically active on stage as he once was, his soaring guitar work and his incisive ability to communicate the essence of a blues phrase are as superb as ever.

On Sunday at the Universal Amphitheatre, King headlined his annual B.B. King Blues Festival on a bill that also included Buddy Guy, Susan Tedeschi and Tommy Castro.

Chicago blues legend Guy, 61, was the festival’s sparkplug, energizing the audience to the point where the fervid whoops, screams and shouts sometimes made it difficult for him to sing with any sort of dynamic range. True, he triggered much of it himself during a long excursion through the crowd, and his renderings of “Hootchie Coochie Man” and “I Got My Mojo Working” were pretty much guaranteed to crank up the voltage.

But he nonetheless was constantly obliged to shush the crowd noise whenever he attempted to sing a soft passage. And that was a shame, because he is a performer with far more musical range than the audience allowed him to display.

Tedeschi was the anomaly in the lineup. In a spaghetti-strap summer dress and heels, she looked like a college sophomore heading for a tea dance, and her look seemed calculated to provide a dramatic contrast to her aggressive guitar playing and fluid singing.

There’s been a great deal of buzz about Tedeschi since she received an unexpected best new artist Grammy nomination earlier this year, but her performance at Universal sounded very much like that of an artist still in search of an identity.

Her phrasing and sound were strongly reminiscent of Bonnie Raitt’s--most noticeably so on John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery.” And her sweet-toned voice, attractive though it may have been as a ballad medium, tended to diminish the impact of potentially passionate numbers such as “It Hurt So Bad.”

Tedeschi has sold a lot of albums and has impressive potential, but she needs to move past the novelty value of blue-eyed blues into the discovery of her own creative voice.