ERIC CLAPTON

Clapton

[Reprise Records]

Eric Clapton has always been willing to shrug off his audience’s expectations and even its desires. Fans might prefer that he crank out one guitar-heroic solo after another, but his tendency toward taste and understatement just won’t let him do it. He abandoned the Yardbirds when they went too pop, Cream when the trio got too self-indulgent and Blind Faith when the supergroup got too popular too quickly. So if you’re thinking that the presence on Clapton of fellow guitar slinger Doyle Bramhall II as co-producer means that six-string fireworks are about to explode, think again. Clapton here is restrained and careful with his guitar licks, deferring to the form and structure of the mostly vintage material he addresses. Unfussy guest turns from famous names like Sheryl Crow, Steve Winwood, Derek Trucks, Wynton Marsalis and others likewise follow suit.

In this relaxed setting, Clapton deftly traces the interrelations among several strains of American music that have often fed and informed one another. An easygoing lope through Hoagy Carmichael’s pop standard “Rockin’ Chair” (also once recorded by Clapton’s friend George Harrison) sits easily alongside an insistent take on bluesman Melvin “Lil’ Son” Jackson’s “Travelin’ Alone.” Meanwhile, the Dixieland jazz of Fats Waller’s jaunty “My Very Good Friend the Milkman” finds common cause with J.J. Cale’s brooding early-’70s number “River Runs Deep.” Clapton stands as a unique marker in its namesake’s continuing journey, one that tells us much about the way American music found its way so deeply into an English boy’s heart. –Chris Neal