Kaki King woke up in Northern California last Thursday morning to a thick gray haze.
She figured she was a good 20 miles southeast of the Bay Area and San Francisco, where wildfires continued to consume hundreds of thousands of acres in the region’s wine country. But the smoke and haze was everywhere.
“The fire is pretty crazy in terms of the smoke,” the celebrated guitar virtuoso said, the smoky air causing her to cough. “It’s unbelievable.”
The Northern California stop was one of several West Coast shows on her itinerary last week before heading to the Southwest with her groundbreaking “The Neck is a Bridge to the Body” multimedia solo guitar show. It comes to Centennial Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 24, as part of the UA Presents season.
“I’m so excited to play there,” said King, 38, who in 2006 made Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “The New Guitar Gods.” She was the only female and the youngest artist to land on the list, which included John Mayer, Wilco’s Nels Cline and Jack White of The White Stripes/The Raconteurs.
So what is “Neck is a Bridge?” A “really beautiful multimedia guitar-based show” in which video images are projected onto her guitar and behind her as she tells the story of the guitar’s creation and evolution, she explained.
“The guitar lit up on stage looks unbelievably magical,” said King, describing how the visuals change from song to song, going from abstract to stark images. “It’s an interesting way of storytelling. To my knowledge, no one else is doing it.”
The story she tells is not so much about the audience figuring out what happens end to end. It’s about the journey, from creation to evolution to deconstruction.
“There’s enough of a story arc that it doesn’t feel like song, visual, song, visual. There’s enough of an emotional arc that really speaks to people and feels like a complete piece over time,” she said. “When you take a piece out of the show and isolate it, it’s like, wow, it’s nice, but everything in the show introduces you to what happens afterward.”
In some ways, the evolution of the guitar kind of mirrors the evolution of the artist, who has been performing professionally since signing her first record deal in 2002. Her style incorporates fingerstyle, flamenco percussive play and fret tapping techniques to create a virtuosic style that has earned her critical acclaim and the Rolling Stone nod.
She’s released 10 recordings including the 2015 “The Neck is a Bridge to the Body,” which she has toured around the world.
“All these years I’ve been doing it now, I still get a total kick out of doing it because it’s so exciting to see people when the guitar first lights up, their reaction,” said Kaki, whose wife gave birth to the couple’s second child, a boy, 12 weeks ago. They also have a 3-year-old daughter.
