Clark Jr

Gary Clark Jr.’s forthcoming album entitled JPEG RAW, his fourth studio release,marks a grand step in his musical evolution. A powerful and expansive artistic statement.While retaining the deep and true resonance of his blues foundations and guitar virtuosity with subtlety yet conviction, he reaches well beyond this time.The emphasis here is on song and studio craft without losing the rawness of his young legend. (Rolling Stone Magazine called him, The Chosen One).The music is dense and adventurous with a more cohesive synthesis of his eclectic musical palette. Hip samples, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Boy Williamson decorate flourishes of African, World Music, even Jazz while merging with blues , rock, R&B and rap; familiar areas he has ventured before, this time with more unity forging a fresh new style. Clark’s lyrics are pointed, deeply personal, outspoken and socially conscious with occasional forays into rap and spoken word from Clark himself.

The original line on Gary Clark, Jr. was that the young Texas guitarist was supposed to be the future of the blues, having been mentored by Jimmie Vaughan and Eric Clapton, but as his star rises, Clark has made it increasingly clear that his creative ambitions run a lot deeper than being the next hotshot guitar slinger. On his major-label debut, 2012's Blak and Blu, Clark demonstrated he isn't interested in following the path of blues traditionalists, and while there's plenty of great guitar work on 2015's The Story of Sonny Boy Slim, this is by no means a conventional blues album. Rather, The Story of Sonny Boy Slim is a thoughtful and passionate amalgam of African-American music past and present, and the blues is one of many crucial ingredients in the formula along with R&B, soul, rock & roll, funk, gospel, and hip-hop (the cyclical drum and guitar patterns that dominate many tracks demonstrate in themselves that the aural dividing line between blues and hip-hop isn't as wide as some like to imagine).

28-year-old Austin, TX, native Gary Clark Jr. exploded onto the music scene with incredible impact when he delivered an incendiary debut performance of his song "Bright Lights" at Eric Clapton's 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival in June 2010. Boasting a distinguished sound that fuses deep blues influences with classic hip-hop and contemporary soul, Clark is a rocking soul man for a new generation.

Gary Clark Jr. is an artist who has alchemized the sounds of the great African-American music forms; blues, soul, jazz, hip-hop and rock-and-roll, into one genre-defying statement of unique power, craft and social significance.

The live and video album Crossroads Guitar Festival 2019 is the fifth release in the series of Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festivals to support his rehabilitation centre in Antigua, the Crossroads Centre, documenting the 2019 performances from two concerts held on September 20 and September 21, 2019 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas. The album was released on November 20, 2020 through Warner and Rhino Records.

Eric Clapton's Crossroads Festival, which features world-class guitar players from all over the globe and has been held every three years since 2004, works as a fundraiser for the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a treatment and educational center Clapton founded in 1998 to help people suffering from chemical dependency. The first three concerts were single-day outdoor events held in Dallas in 2004, and in Chicago in 2007 and 2010, with the fourth, the concert represented by this two-disc set, moving indoors to Madison Square Garden in New York and expanding to two nights in 2013…