The New Blues Explosion

FOR A GENRE so deeply and tragically entrenched in history, stretching back one and a half centuries, the blues finds itself in a defiantly rude state of health in 2020. The world is a very different place now, and still far from perfect, but the potency of pentatonic scales, 12-bars and b5s to the human ear has never waned, thanks to the musicians keeping this form of expression alive.

For this issue, we wanted to celebrate the players who have been doing precisely that, whether by dedicating their lives to faithful recreations of the sounds of the past or finding new ways to reinvent a very classic formula by introducing country, jazz or hip-hop elements. As an art form, the blues has never been more diverse and musically rich, which means there’s no shortage of sounds and talent from which to take inspiration and learn.

In this lesson, we’ve sought out the electric blues wisdom of Gary Clark Jr., Eric Gales, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Ana Popovi?, Samantha Fish, Joanne Shaw Taylor and King Solomon Hicks, and provided some sample licks in each guitarist’s style to help you put their techniques to work in your own playing.

GARY CLARK JR.

It would be fair to say singer/guitarist and multiple Grammy-winner Gary Clark Jr. has a complicated relationship with the blues. On the one hand, he learned virtually everything he knows about music from growing up in Austin, Texas, starting with his experiences at the local Baptist church, where he backed the choir, and later at Antone’s, the very same club in which Stevie Ray Vaughan and his elder brother Jimmie had famously cut their teeth some decades prior. Those early