Hubert Sumlin, godfather of the electric blues guitar.

Lank on his stool at the right of the stage, right hand fidgeting over the guitar pickups like a shorn tarantula, Hubert Sumlin seemed as pleased as the rest of the bobbing Jazz Standard crowd on Thursday the 10th. His band had jump-started the late set, dishing out a steamy blues charge. "Meet me at the bottom," growled singer David Johansen, his hand cupping his harmonica, "I wooon't have time to lose?."

Johansen lurched and swayed, hair mopped down over dark glasses, with Jimmy Vivino slinging bright slide licks for the set's first solo. The lean rhythm section (the core, with Vivino, of Letterman's band) hit hard on the fast pace, but make no mistake: Everybody was out to hear Hubert.

He lay in wait, eyes keen through windshield glasses, plucking his Stratocaster through the opening gambit. Throaty cheers, and the band rolled on to "Crawling King Snake," lithe with a heavy bottom and honky-tonk piano from a friend who'd joined from her table in the house. Then Vivino called across the stage to the Man, and Hubert yanked open the song, the night, his bag of blues. Supple, otherworldly, penetrating and elusive, Sumlin picked and skirted, left fingers high on the frets. Drenched in sultry feeling and pocked with tantalizing wit, he bent a plateful of notes in about 19 seconds, then wheeled back to face front with a gracious smile for the shouting crowd.

The room was beside itself, the latest in more than five decades of rooms that Sumlin's shot with joy. Because Hubert pulls it from inside your chest, hips, sinuses; his guitar speaks from within the furniture or the ceiling. "He's the template, the prototype of rock 'n' roll blues guitar," as Johansen pronounced from the stage. The singer elucidated at the end of the night: "Bloomfield copied every note, Clapton took it from him, and the rest is?" He tapered off with a devilish grin.

Part of the rest is electric guitar history. The rock pantheon?Jimmy Page, Stevie Ray Vaughn, et. al.?originates directly from what Hubert Sumlin's hauled from his guitar. His first gig, in Arkansas with Sumlin just into his teens, was with legendary harmonica player James Cotton. Called North by the big man, Howlin' Wolf, he then left to tour with Muddy Waters before returning to Wolf in Chicago. There, along with bandmate Willie Dixon, Sumlin knocked off a stellar playlist of 50s originals from "Shake for Me" and "Wang Dang Doodle" to "Smokestack Lightnin'" and "Sittin' on Top of the World."

Those records created the blues rock foment of the 60s (the Stones, Cream, the Doors, the Dead), with Sumlin's terse solos the seedbed from which rock guitar heroics sprang. "He created the vocabulary used by Jimi Hendrix; Hubert was his favorite guitar player," says guitar maestro Elliott Sharp, who's made several CDs with Sumlin. "And Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, down to all us weirdos, Henry Kaiser, Marc Ribot and myself?we all love Hubert's playing. Robbie Robertson, he's right out of Hubert. Keith Richards.

"Hubert's like a Cubist poet on guitar. His whole idea of melody is very different, it's raw, it's angular and it's pungent. And it goes back to the Delta?you can hear the whole history of 20th-century blues in it."

But what's best of "the rest" Johansen alluded to, is Sumlin's living music. At the Standard, the classics hit hot on one another's heels, possessed of canny wiles that undercut blues rock's stadium-sized elaborations. Johansen channels Wolf, the self-described "300 pounds of heavenly joy," with brooding, mounting ferocity, as daring as any act in his brash career.

"Evil" bangs in slow, Johansen lofting his pelvis off his stool like an upthrust crossbow. Sumlin flings low bass riffs, then stutters a chord solo accented by the piano. After counter-punching a strutting solo to pinion "Back Door Man"'s fraught sexual shuffle, he's all lax splendor, romping with the band through "Wang Dang Doodle," tumbling out rhythm figures: chicken-scratch arabesques, clucking punctuation, flicking high up a jagged edge.

His mates deteriorate "Wang Dang"'s rousing boogie woogie into sonic oblivion (blues being pain you can't help but dance to), then the manager calls for a finale from alongside the stage. Johansen jeers, "I shoulda quit you baby, a long time ago," and Hubert's plinking lickety-split, the snazzy, slashing ace of rhythm, his solo another peculiar thrill chipped no frills from the pounding bounce of "Killing Floor."

"I've been playing this music ever since I was eight years old," Sumlin said between sets the next night, feisty and genial in turns. "I'm from a poor family, the baby of 13. Me and Cotton?James Cotton?we got a little band together. I was playin' Charlie Patton and Muddy Waters, and whuppin' everybody else. I was alright. And I knew what I was gonna be, at eight years old, with my first guitar."

Sumlin was right, and he's stayed that way. He and Johansen did a duet in February at the big Salute to the Blues extravaganza at Radio City, Congress having declared 2003 the Year of the Blues, at least in part because Hubert Sumlin followed the black cat that crossed his path.