Wrapping your arms around the artistry of Gary Clark Jr. is an attempt at sorcery. It exists nowhere in particular, swimming in and out of vibes. Even on stage, Clark’s band performs without a net (set list), using audience’s energy as fabric to customize show sequences. The process is as reciprocal as it is spiritual. But for the 6’4 evangelist, it’s bigger than the word. The GCJ experience is not defined by a studio booth alone. Thus, in 2014 the artist whom Rolling Stone Magazine called “the Chosen One” offered a compromise via his first double album Gary Clark Jr. – Live. 

Since a preteen who put aside drums, trumpet and piano to include six strings in his music arsenal, he has been entrancing crowds – whether in church, on 6th street or his old stomping ground, Antone’s. On his latest composition, the 30-year-old’s 10,000 hours for mastery is unequivocal with a swagger to match. Texas rap legend Scarface will be proud of Clark’s proclamation on “Ain’t Messin ‘Round”: “I don’t believe in competition. Ain’t nobody else like me around.” Then there’s Clark’s pen, which has a shape shifter’s talent for fitting big stories into short phrases.  The song “Blak And Blu” supports this gorgeously; “When My Train Pulls In,” possibly more as Clark paints the inescapable frustration of living poor despite not touching economics. 

The aforementioned track is where the mastermind-to-fingertips phenomenon blooms. Chord manipulations and note runnings shoot past each other, high and low, never clashing like a light show of comets. Then the string master graduates to full puppeteer, morphing his six-stringed tool into a screaming alto. Clark’s strum is so magical it nearly disguises his songbird – those shark grey vocals sing the prettiest hues of blue. On cuts like “Numb,” “Things Are Changin’” and the Grammy-award winning “Please Come Home,” diamonds can be heard falling from the speakers.

Gary Clark Jr. - Live is clearly a collection of Junior’s brightest global exhibitions, but more valuably one of the richest live albums in recent decades. Clark has the incomprehensible ability to fuse genres, distort styles then blend them, all to serve up his own black fruit punch. Witness “Catfish Blues” which alchemizes the mud of the Mississippi Delta with the hip-hop swagger of The Marcy Projects. He approaches the endangered art of improvisation with a subtlety and homage. Only Clark would add the bottom of the Jackson 5’s “Can You Feel It” baseline to “Ain’t Messin’ Around” or reheat his “Next Door Neighbor Blues” with dashes of Sly Stone, Bo Diddley and RZA. It ain’t clean eating, but still purist catnip.