T BONE, RARE & PRIME, IN SUMMIT MEETING WITH B.B. KING

T Bone Burnett appears to have a lock on the Producer of the Year Grammy, given his auteur-level work on Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ irresistible Raising Sand, John Mellencamp’s uncompromising Life, Death, Love & Freedom. The hat trick on this run could be One Kind Favor (Geffen, Aug. 26), Burnett’s first collaboration with living legend B.B. King. The album finds the great blues guitarist and singer revisiting the music that influenced him in the 1950s, when he began an extraordinary professional journey that profoundly changed the texture of modern blues playing.

Tracked at The Village in West L.A., One Kind Favor is meant to sound like an album recorded in a bygone era, the specialty of Burnett and his ace engineer/mixer Mike Piersante, whose period pieces have included O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the soundtrack to Cold Mountain. To get the vintage feel, they replicated the kind of blues band King had back in the day, bringing in some of the greats, including Dr. John on piano, Nathan East on stand-up bass and Jim Keltner on drums. Studio conditions of the time were reproduced. The resulting album sounds both rustic and immediate, in keeping with T Bone’s M.O.

Here’s the full track listing for One Kind Favor, with the name of the artist who originally recorded the track in parentheses:” See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (Blind Lemon Jefferson), “I Get So Weary” (T-Bone Walker), “Get These Blues Off Me” (Lee Vida Walker), “How Many More Years” (Chester Burnett), “Waiting for Your Call” (Oscar Lollie), “My Love Is Down” (Lonnie Johnson), “The World Is Gone Wrong” (Walter Vinson, also known as Walter Jacobs, and Lonnie Chatmon, core members of the Mississippi Sheiks), “Blues Before Sunrise” (John Lee Hooker), “Midnight Blues” (John Willie “Shifty” Henry), “Backwater Blues” (Big Bill Broonzy), “Sitting on Top of the World” (Vinson and Chatmon) and “Tomorrow Night” (Lonnie Johnson).

Earlier this year, Burnett revealed to our own Bud Scoppa that his list of upcoming projects includes the next album from Glen Hansard, possibly with his band The Frames, and The Who, although Pete Townshend recently acknowledged that he has yet to be inspired to write new songs for such an undertaking.

In September, King will begin hosting his own weekly radio show on XM’s newly relaunched blues channel, B.B. King’s Bluesville (ch. 74).