Robert Cray last performed in Japan 13 years ago at the Japan Blues Carnival — an experience that for him is now a bittersweet memory.
"I finally got to meet Johnny 'Guitar' Watson," Cray recalls over the phone from Fresno, California, where he was playing a concert. Watson died of a heart attack on stage in Yokohama hours after their meeting. "I had been a fan for so long and I remember I rode the elevator down with him. It was the first opportunity for me to meet him."
Watson, who had successfully transformed himself in the 1970s from a pure blues artist to a funky "gangster of love," was 61 at the time. Cray was 42, the youngest of the three foreign acts (the third was harpist James Cotton) who played that year's JBC, Japan's oldest nonclassical-music festival. Cray is this year's headliner, which is appropriate in the sense that the festival has since been renamed the Japan Blues & Soul Carnival.