Buddy Guy’s mojo was just fine at the Wilbur
A few minutes into his Monday night set at the Wilbur theatre, the blues grandmaster buddy Guy pulled one of his many gimmicks out of his bag of magic. While bending a note with his fretting hand, he tugged on his ear lobe with his picking hand, as though he were controlling the sound through his skin.
the electric guitar has been an extension of Guy’s still-lithe body almost all his life, since he first took up plucking a homemade, two-string diddley bow as a farmboy in Louisiana. At 87, he’s on an extended farewell tour that also took him to the Chevalier theatre in Medford on Wednesday.
He was about to “play something so funky you can smell it,” he said with a mischievous grin that rarely left his face Monday. that song was the Willie Dixon classic “Hoochie Coochie Man,” first recorded by the late Muddy Waters. One of the curiosities of Guy’s 70year career is that, for all his fame, he has written only a couple of songs that have become part of the canon. He’s more of an envoy of the Chicago blues style.
In a rambling 75-minute set, Guy led his superb band — guitarist Ric Hall, bassist Orlando Wright, young keyboardist Dan Souvigny, and drummer tom Hambridge — through a gallery tour of blues pillars, among them John Lee Hooker’s “boom boom,” Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King bee.” Hall stepped to center stage at one point and ripped through a few bars of “Purple Haze.”
Hambridge, who got his start in boston in the 1980s as the frontman for t.H. and the Wreckage, opened the show with a brief set of his own songs, accompanied on electric piano by Souvigny. Standing at a tiny cocktail kit, he transformed his snare drum (and occasional raps on the microphone stand) into a full orchestra.
On “the fixer,” which he wrote for George thorogood, Hambridge got the crowd to join him with appropriately placed finger snaps. Introducing another original, “the blues been Mighty Good to Me,” he explained how he invited Allen toussaint to duet with him on his 2018 album “the Nola Sessions.” It would prove to be, he said, toussaint’s last recording date.
As a producer, Hambridge has worked with the late b.b. King, Susan tedeschi, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and many others. but his longest professional relationship has been with Guy.
Midway through his own set, Guy explained how Hambridge helped him write “Skin Deep,” the soulful title ballad to an album he released in 2008. “Skin deep/Underneath we’re all the same,” Guy sang softly. At his advanced age, he’s still attuned to dynamics: When he hushed the crowd with a faint falsetto or a few brushed notes, he was only setting them up for the next galeforce flurry.
Opening with “Damn Right, I’ve Got the blues,” the title track to his 1991 comeback album, Guy set a playful tone with a few pelvic thrusts. His signature polka-dotted Stratocaster blended seamlessly with his polka-dotted dress shirt.
that bag of magic contained plenty of tricks. At one point, his left hand spidering across the strings, he played a run up the fretboard. Later, laying his guitar down, he tapped out the familiar chords of “Sunshine of Your Love” with a drumstick.
And after ceding the stage during “Got My Mojo Working” to his guitarplaying son, Greg Guy, the man of the hour returned to the microphone as his band vamped its outro jam. Having already shed his instrument, buddy Guy couldn’t help himself. He played an air guitar.