A blues summit captured for Canadian TV on December 6, 1983 at CHCH-TV studios in Hamilton, Ontario, and shelved for 16 years before Stax finally put it out in August 1999. Albert King was 60 and a generation removed from his Stax glory years; Stevie Ray Vaughan was 29 and riding the rocket that Texas Flood had launched five months earlier. The pair are backed by pianist/organist Tony Llorens, bassist Gus Thornton, and drummer Michael Llorens, and the whole thing plays like an after-hours master class — King leading, SRV chasing, both grinning.
King was famously cool on the idea of sharing a bandstand with someone he didn't know, until he placed Vaughan as the "skinny kid" who'd sat in with him at Antone's in Austin years earlier. Once that clicked, the session loosened up and turned into the document of mentor and disciple that blues fans had hoped for but never had on tape.
Cool stuff:
- Recorded live to videotape for a CHCH-TV show called In Session — the only filmed meeting of King and Vaughan ever made, and the only studio-quality multitrack of the two together
- Vaughan plays right-handed Strats while King plays his Flying V "Lucy" upside-down and left-handed, strung for a right-handed player. Listening on headphones you can hear two completely different bend vocabularies in the same room
- King was Vaughan's hero from childhood — SRV explicitly modeled "Pride and Joy" and much of his bending style on King's Born Under a Bad Sign records
- Sat in the vault for 16 years before Stax issued it in 1999; a CD/DVD edition with three previously unreleased performances followed in 2010, and Craft Recordings expanded it to a 3-LP set in October 2024
- Vaughan died less than seven years after this session; King died less than a decade after it — making this small Ontario TV taping the only proper meeting on tape between two of the most influential electric blues guitarists of the 20th century
Spin it for: an unhurried master-and-pupil blues conversation, two left-and-right-handed Strat/V tones laced together, and a piece of late-career Albert King caught at his loosest.
Standouts: "Born Under a Bad Sign" · "Pride and Joy" · "Blues at Sunrise" · "Call It Stormy Monday"
Sources: Wikipedia · Analog Planet · Craft Recordings · The Second Disc · CultureSonar · Discogs