Bobby 'Blue' Bland
His California Album

This is not a review.

It is a heartfelt appeal, one that even an elector (of what remains) of the Italian Democratic Party would not make these days. Don't read it, don't waste your time. Instead, download this album. Done? He won't mind too much. After all, he was a best-seller in genre charts for over half a decade - fifty-one singles in the Top 40 R&B, an epochal first LP that in AD 1961, if one must believe the original sleeve notes, sold about fourteen million copies. And today, although his ID card says we're headed towards eighty - Robert Calvin Bland, Rosemark, Tennessee, born in 1930 - I would bet he continues to perform live, filling the venues that host him, an event for which in the '60s this seduction master, despite not having an Apollonian physique, was used to having young and adoring girls of color throw dampened undergarments onto the stage. Or possibly better, search for it and make it yours. It's in the catalog. In short, whether you possess it in some hidden corner of your hard-drive as physical space of a few dozen megabytes or as a round little object in plexiglass casing, it doesn't matter. Listen to it. That's what matters. Listened? Good, now I know you are truly my friends.

But how many of you will there be? That's the problem. If Don Lisander Manzoni ironically addressed his "twenty-five readers", how many can this humble scribe of these lines count? Unfortunately, without irony, many less. And even if that were not the case, still too few to make it so that, despite what has just been stated, such an interpreter would come out of the limbo of African American artists known only to African Americans. One does not need to be a connoisseur of black music to know Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, or Marvin Gaye. The music of Bobby Bland, although of the same caliber as the aforementioned, is instead a matter for a restricted, too restricted, circle of happy chosen few,. In the meantime, I've said it, the magic word. Interpretor. Because this is what Bobby the Sad was and is. An interpreter. Genre: gospel soul R&B. Nothing more and nothing less. Not a virtuoso of an instrument whose rudiments he never knew, nor did he ever write a single song among those he sang of his own hand. He remains a grainy baritone voice capable of breaking your heart and turning everything he came in contact with into gold. I don't know about you, but for me it was enough.

Let's clarify right away. I'm proposing you listen to a "minor" album by a "minor" artist. About the minor artist and how this statement is equivalent to blasphemy, we have already said. Let's get to why "His California Album." I love it dearly. More so, I struggle to think of an album to which I am equally attached among the tens of thousands that have passed through my stereo over the years. Sure, the aforementioned million-seller, by name of "Two steps from the blues," can rightly be defined as an epochal album as a link between the primeval gospel that still smells of spiritual, the blues, and the soul that cheekily emerges in the '60s, leaving the churches to enter clubs first and then the charts. That is the historically indispensable object to get acquainted with this gentleman. But if I have to think of a perfect album to make someone fall in love with this kind of music, his California Album, for what it may be worth, is my recommendation.

It was released in 1973, when Bobby Bland was rather out there. Having left his mentor Joe Scott, the man with whom he had built his success for almost a decade, he began a slow but relentless decline for a good five years. The traditional soul train of the sixties being on a practically dead track, our man didn’t move with the times. No left turn towards the then-dominant funk-rock post-Woodstock, much less to the right in the more polished territories of the Philly-sound or, worse, to the more typically profitable territories of the nascent disco. Bobby Bland thus decides to inaugurate his second artistic youth, coinciding with a new record deal, by doing what he has always done: an R&B album. Indeed, he even did it with an orchestra. A commercially suicidal move if ever there could have been one. You do as he did. Don't care.

There are ten songs that rewrite the interpretive history of the genre. Ten absolute classics that, although our hero appears on the cover dressed as a pimp out on leave from a blaxploitation film, are the utmost in terms of elegance and class, so much so that one can only think of a singer in smoking. A black Bryan Ferry, however, with that voice, gentle and yet raspy as it had never been before, splendidly in symbiosis with a group of musicians accompanying him miraculously and with orchestral arrangements that make you repeatedly go through the liner notes in search of the absent name of Isaac Hayes. How can one not think of Black Moses suddenly dazzled by the blues while listening to the trembling progress of the opening track "This time I'm gone for good," where Bobby (never so) 'Blue' sings in a way that sands away the soul? This is the common denominator of the album, a vividly electric R&B in which full-bodied organs, earthy horns, and plaintive strings integrate. All uniquely tied by the two most important instruments played on this album: Mr. Bland's vocal cords, always perfectly at ease when presented with intense blues-ballad such as "It's not the spotlight", "(If loving you is wrong) I don't want to be right," "Help me through the day," the marvelous "Friday, the 13^th child," the rock-tinged and stunning (B.B. King would kill to have such a wonder in his repertoire) closure of "I've got to use my imagination." But also in the swaying allure of "Up and down world," as in the trotting step of "The right place at the right time" or "Where my baby went," Bobby seems to take us by the hand and tell us that with that voice, he can truly do whatever he wants. And if we still were not convinced, we only need to listen to the rendition present here of a classic such as "Goin' down slow." The mournful blues of Jimmy Oden, sort of the My way of black music that Howlin' Wolf used his raw manner on, is revisited here with utmost elegance by the man from Rosemark, who, aided by the ascending rocker crescendo of a guitar splendidly in the limelight, by fat brass, by an Al Kooper-like organ, and by seductive choruses, instead of a glass of absinthe seems to drink a cup of sparkling wine.

And with that, farewell to success. And who cares. Will I have gained a few more friends?