Bangkok Jungle

Albert King, SRV ‘In Session’ Reissued June 25, 2009

December 1983, guitarist Albert King was already a bona fide blues music legend with better than three decades of experience under his belt. Fellow Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan had just released Texas Flood, his acclaimed debut album. When the two came together in the studios of an independent Canadian television station that month, the result was musical magic. On June 30, 2009 Stax Records – the label for which King recorded some of his most popular work during the 1960s and ’70s – will reissue In Session, a live document of this musical collaboration between the veteran bluesman and the young guitarslinger. Digitally remastered and with new liner notes from Stax Records’ Bill Belmont, and music journalists Lee Hildebrand and Dan Forte, In Session was originally released in 1999 and would subsequently hit #1 on the Billboard magazine blues chart, selling better than 300,000 copies.

King and Vaughan weren’t strangers when they were paired to perform on the Canadian TV concert series, the two first meeting in 1973. But, as Lee Hildebrand points out in his liner notes for the reissue, “Albert King wasn’t sure who it was he’d been booked to jam with on December 6, 1983 in the studios of CHCH, an independent TV station in Hamilton, Ontario, though his manager assured him he knew the young guitar hotshot. Sho’ ’nuff, Albert recognized the 29-year-old Texan immediately – not as fast-rising star Stevie Ray Vaughan but as Little Stevie, the skinny kid who’d been coming around and sitting in every time Albert passed through Austin.”

The two incendiary guitarists would deliver an explosive, exciting performance, the younger artist deferring to the elder statesman of the blues, but both displaying the kind of raging fretwork that was already King’s calling card, and would later become Vaughan’s trademark sound. Stevie Ray sings on his hit, “Pride & Joy,” while King cuts loose on familiar material like “Stormy Monday” and “Blues At Sunrise.”

After their performance together, King would continue to tour and record until his death in 1992; tragically, Vaughan died in a helicopter crash almost two years earlier. In Session is the only know recording of the two giants playing together, and it’s well worth a place on your shelf if you enjoy either bluesman’s work.