Music review

ORONO — The enormous man and still larger presence that is B.B. King ambled out to center stage at the Maine Center for the Arts Thursday night, and owned the place before he or Lucille uttered a sound. Then he spent two hours earning it.

Lucille is King’s guitar (like his human loves, Lucille is actually one of many, but I wanted to believe that the guitar in King’s hands Thursday was his one and only). He stroked her, pinched her, danced with her and kissed her.

And Lucille sang. She murmured softly. She belted out bouncy riffs. She lingered on blue notes, then trailed off into a trembling vibrato.

Only Thursday did I understand why King calls his guitar Lucille. It is not eccentricity, or a slick piece of packaging. It is a way of saying, in seven letters, what B.B. King does that nobody else does as well.

It is his second voice. In its dynamic range, in its quirky phrasing, in its concentration on fewer, fuller notes, King’s guitar owes more to singer Billie Holiday than any blues guitar tradition.

The only one who may have been in better voice than Lucille on Thursday was King himself. The same voice that ripped out a gravelly “Caladonia” rounded out into deep, silky tones on songs like “Understand,” tones that have yet to be captured fully on any recording.

All of this needs an asterisk: King and his seven-piece band spent most of the night battling with a soundboard mix that might have killed a lesser performance. Between outbursts of feedback, Lucille’s overzealous amplifier gave off a hum to match each twitch of King’s hand. His vocals, on the other hand, were undermiked and often lost. On a few moments when the whole band let loose, all the speakers could deliver was a musical maelstrom.

But even when the electronic confusion threatened to distract from the music, B.B. King the showman — B.B. King the man — held the ecstatic sellout crowd in his hand.

Late in the show King told a story of boy-does-girl-wrong, girl-leaves, boy-sings-blues, weaving it through “Nobody Loves Me But My Mama” and a double-time version of “The Thrill Is Gone.” He narrated, he played the man arguing with himself, he even did the woman’s angry sashay toward the taxi, without ever standing up.

B.B. King did not need theatrics, however, to win the crowd. His wide smiles were enough to raise a roar from the seats. He and his band were having fun, too.

“Can I build a house right over there?” he asked the crowd midway through a 20-minute standing ovation, jerking his thumb in the general direction of Old Town. “I would like to live here.”

The spirit of the moment even moved King to praise the unannounced warm-up band, Waterville’s Blue Flames, who slumped through a 30-minute set of blues like children practicing scales while their friends played outside. Perhaps he was referring to the spirit and power shown by D.W. Gill’s lead vocals; perhaps he was being kind.

At 11 p.m., the 65-year-old B.B. King — king of the blues — finished up with a soaring, spiritual version of “Peace to the World,” a song off his latest album, “Live at San Quentin.” It was his second encore, his 13th song, his 120th minute of performance so intense that the giddy, sweaty crowd emerged almost silent.

King’s band, which played the first two songs on its own, deserves notice not only for giving the master a rich backdrop, but for top-notch solo performances — inventive, but clearly influenced by King’s style. Albert King, B.B.’s nephew and the band’s conductor, led the way with shivering heights and rumbling lows in tenor saxaphone solos thick with feeling.