With his new album, blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr. shows a dizzying range — from jazz-pop to funk to shred. But as he tells Guitar Player, he was never a blues guy to begin with.
BY JOE BOSSO PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAX CRACE
PLAYERS| GARY CLARK JR.
JPEG RAW IS Gary Clark Jr.’s first post-pandemic album, but its origins date back to the 2020 lockdown, when the guitarist, like every other musician on the planet, was forced to scrap his tour plans and await a return to normal life. “It was a weird time,” he says. “The world was shut down, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was hiding out in L.A., just waiting for kid number three to come. There wasn’t much else to do, so I started making beats and playing guitar. Somehow I found myself listening to things that I hadn’t paid much attention to growing up.”
In the same way that he immersed himself in rock and the blues as a young guitarist, Clark dove head-first into the world of 1990s guitar virtuosos. As he explains, “When I started on guitar, my friend Eve taught me about the blues, and I learned about rock from my friend Gilberto. He introduced me to guys like Slash and the whole G3 thing — Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson. During the pandemic, I was bored and I thought, What if I studied that? I basically turned into a teenager again. I locked myself in a room and started shredding guitar.”
Armed with a Floyd Rose–equipped Ibanez, Clark cranked up the distortion and woodshedded triads and “funky weird scales” while watching videos of Steve Vai’s “For the Love of God” and Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover.” And he had a blast. “I was doing whatever I wanted,” he says. “I wasn’t worried about being Gary Clark Jr., or whoever everybody thinks they know. I was just being the guy I know.”
By now, listeners should know better than to ever even try to pigeonhole Clark. Ever since he made his debut in 2012 with the album Blak and Blu, he’s freely mixed elements of blues, R&B, rock and hip-hop on records that featured his bold and expressive guitar playing. His last album, 2019’s This Land, took his stylistic influences even further, adding splashes of reggae, psychedelia and punk to the menu. JPEG RAW(it’s an acronym for Jealousy, Pride, Ego, Greed, Rules, Alter Ego and Worlds) is his most diverse album yet. At times it’s like a collision of moods and styles, sounds and textures. And it’s impossible to predict from one song to the next where he’s
