One of Buddy Guy’s most memorable performances is on the song “First Time I Met the Blues.” It’s a life-changing supernatural being in Guy’s telling, as scary as it is inspiring.

    Scott Holt, who will play Jan. 21 at Buddy Guy’s Legends, can relate. In his late teens while growing up in Tennessee, he became obsessed with the guitar and Jimi Hendrix. After six months of playing all day, every day, he saw Hendrix’s inspiration, Buddy Guy, in concert. When he met Guy later that night, Holt couldn’t even speak.

    “My father took me to his show and afterward he was talking to Buddy, explaining my music obsession to him; he had to do all the talking because I was just starstruck,” Holt recalls with a laugh. “But Buddy invites me to his hotel room the next day, and there we were sitting across from each other playing guitars and him telling me stories about Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters. I didn’t understand the depths of what was happening, but it was the beginning of what has been a 20-year friendship.”

A few key moments Saturday from Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival at Toyota Park:

11:45 a.m.: Emcee Bill Murray emerges to demonstrate that even he has learned a few things since the last Crossroads festival, in 2007, by playing a very out-of-tune version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” before a smiling Eric Clapton strolls onstage to rescue him. Everyone’s laughing, the sun is shining, and Clapton urges the audience to say “a quiet prayer” to keep the predicted thundershowers away.

12:07 p.m.: Clapton re-emerges to play call-and-response – or is it cat and mouse? – with Sonny Landreth’s guitar on “The Promise Land.” It’s fierce stuff, a good sign that Clapton is ready to mix it up (not always a given in the last two decades). “Well, how about that?” Landreth says after his lengthy head-to-head with Clapton ends. “Not bad for 12:15 in the afternoon.”

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

Jimi Hendrix combined a jazz musician’s fluidity and inventiveness on his instrument with unparalleled rock flair. That he left behind only three studio albums before he died in 1970 made him even more intriguing to subsequent generations, as if his fans were trying to figure out what might have been had he lived. For four decades, they consumed every musical leftover from his short career, no matter how poorly conceived, recorded or packaged it might’ve been. Indeed, hundreds of posthumous Hendrix recordings have been issued, most of them exploitive scraps.

But “Valleys of Neptune” (Sony Legacy) is legit – not quite a lost album, but darn near close in that it compiles 12 previously unreleased studio recordings, most from a key 1969 phase in the guitarist’s career. If it doesn’t tell us anything new about Hendrix, it is a sharp snapshot of a musical genius in the studio during a period of transition. Hendrix revisited older material (“Stone Free,” “Fire,” “Red House”), covered favorite artists (Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” Elmore James’ “Bleeding Heart”) and finessed newer material (the title song, “Lullaby for the Summer”). With three exceptions, the tracks are blissfully free of the overdubs and other studio manipulations that mar many of his posthumous recordings. Instead, we get a you-are-there document of Hendrix in the last volatile days of his great power trio with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, the Experience.

This combo is represented on the majority of the tracks, and its vitality still vibrates the speakers – never more so than on a definitive live-in-the-studio version of “Here My Train A Comin’,” with Hendrix bending vocal and guitar notes with shamanistic verve. He veers off into his own private galaxy as a guitarist during an instrumental version of “Sunshine of Your Love,” and conjures a new world as a lyricist on the title track. On the latter, Hendrix’s fluid rhythm-guitar work underpins images brimming with Apocalyptic foreboding: “See visions of sleeping peaks erupting/Releasing all hell that/Will shake the Earth from end to end.” Not unlike Hendrix’s music itself.

greg@gregkot.com

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