Buddy Guy turned 90 this summer, an age that makes the phrase “career retrospective” sound comically insufficient. On Oct. 1, Radio City Music Hall will host Buddy’s Got the Blues, a birthday concert that places one of the central figures of electric blues inside a room built for spectacle.

The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. The premise is celebratory, but Guy’s importance is larger than longevity. His playing helped connect Chicago blues to the rock guitar vocabulary that followed, influencing musicians who carried its bent notes, attack and theatricality into arenas around the world.

The history of popular music is full of influence that becomes more famous than its source. Blues musicians supplied techniques, songs and attitudes that rock performers transformed into mass culture, often receiving less money and attention in return. Guy is one of the artists who lived long enough to watch that imbalance become part of the public conversation around the music.

His guitar style made virtuosity feel physical. Notes do not merely arrive; they bend, sting and sometimes seem to argue with the singer. That expressiveness helped demonstrate why electric amplification was not simply a way to make blues louder. It could change the emotional vocabulary of the instrument.

Radio City creates an interesting frame. Blues mythology tends to favor clubs, juke joints and modest rooms, while Radio City announces grandeur before anyone reaches the stage. Yet Guy’s career has long exceeded the dimensions of any one scene. A 90th birthday celebration is entitled to chandeliers.

A birthday with a serious guest list

The concert also raises the question of what audiences want from very late-career performances. Technical perfection is an impoverished standard. The meaning lies partly in presence: a musician standing inside the tradition he helped build, with decades of history audible before the first phrase is played.

Birthday tributes can easily become ceremonies in which reverence overwhelms music. The best version of this evening will resist that temptation. Blues is not improved by being placed behind glass. Guy’s significance comes from the electricity of the form, not from behaving like a monument.

There is something moving, too, about celebrating a guitarist at an age when popular music once assumed performers would have disappeared from view. Rock and blues have now existed long enough to confront old age as a normal part of artistic life.

That changes the audience. Several generations can hear the same phrase through different histories: as a direct memory, an inherited influence or a sound encountered first through younger musicians.

Buddy’s Got the Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert Celebration takes place at Radio City Music Hall Oct. 1 at 7:30 p.m. This is a preview based on announced event information, not a review of the performance.

This is not a solitary late-career appearance. Radio City’s announced lineup includes Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Jon Batiste, Gary Clark Jr., Joe Bonamassa, Shemekia Copeland, Samantha Fish, Billy F Gibbons, Robert Randolph, Bobby Rush, Jimmie Vaughan and others, with additional surprise guests promised.

That guest list makes the concert an unusually literal map of Guy’s influence. Different generations of blues and rock guitarists can stand on the same stage, but they need not imitate him for the connection to be audible. Guy’s importance lies partly in how widely his vocabulary traveled.

The risk with a lineup this crowded is ceremonial overload: introductions, tributes and cameos crowding out the looseness that makes blues work. The opportunity is the opposite. Put enough musicians who know this language together, and the evening can behave less like an awards show than a very large birthday jam.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 1, with the concert scheduled for 7:30. At 90, Guy hardly needs another monument. A room full of musicians playing with him is the more convincing tribute.