Bobby Blue Bland: Blues at Midnight

Fading genres of popular music like jazz, blues, and soul seem to be audibly straining under the weight of their situation. Should they try to assert their relevance next to such flashy new forms as IDM and glitch, or should they simply resign themselves to the pasture, repackaging and remastering greatest hits collections? For Bobby Bland, the problem is especially pressing. He sits astride two fading giants in blues and soul, but he still retains enough stature to at least hang around the margins of the music business. Over fifty years into his career, he has stood center stage on the Beale Street scene that produced a select handful of other legends, but while he’s managed to avoid a fate as grim as Russian-Roulette-casualty Johnny Ace, he’s never achieved the kind of comfortable success of his frequent tour partner, B.B. King. Thus, Bland’s new Blues at Midnight is a badly needed paycheck as much as an apologia for his musical forms.

Whether or not he consciously raised it, the question of relevance doggedly hangs around Blues at Midnight, leaving more of an impression than any of the desultory songs will. Bland’s voice remains in fine, if significantly altered, shape even as its owner slides into the far side of 70. The musicians are all excellent and controlled, and the horn arrangements by Charles Rose and Harrison Calloway enliven the proceedings nicely. The production is clean without being too fussy, but it still gives away the primary shortcoming of the album, namely that it doesn’t sound bluesy or soulful so much as a slick, digital facsimile. Both of Bland’s source genres have so deeply entered the collective American unconscious that any freshness he and his crew might have scraped together is simply lost. Bland knows his craft so well that the artifice begins to show, and the tricks he employs to convey the feeling of his material sound like, well, tricks. We’ve heard this stuff too many times before to be convinced whether or not it’s well performed. His horn section, despite their excellent parts, play too much like studio pros to be affecting. That wonderful laziness of Stax-era brass is replaced by a snappy imitation, played with ample precision and no feeling whatsoever.

For the most part, Blues at Midnight shoots for the tried and true standards of vintage Bland (as if to forcibly yank the words “He’s still got it!” from loyal listeners’ throats), but a few signs pop up that someone involved in the creation of this record thought it would be wise to hedge their bets with some updating touches. Bland himself continues with his regrettable late-period snorting, a sound so bizarre and unmusical as to defy adequate description. Throughout Blues, a peculiar “r-r-r-r-awp” comes charging out of the murky depths of his throat at highly inappropriate times, although it is admittedly difficult to think of any occasions when this violent half-snore would be apropos. A meandering take of “What a Wonderful World” won’t oust the original from its place of glory, but Bland is a fine choice for recasting the immortal song.

On the last two tracks of the album, however, the modernizing elements go firmly awry. A remake of Z.Z. Hill’s “I’m a Blues Man” is far too self-conscious to be effective, with dropped names of blues legends less befitting of a man who sang the blues than of someone who meticulously collected its highlights on CD. Worst of the bunch is “Ghetto Nights”, a goofy attempt to depict Bland as a product of the ghetto. While he certainly did grow up in difficult circumstances, singing to escape toiling away in a cotton field or some other brutalizing physical labor, he can’t fool anybody into thinking that there are strict parallels between his upbringing and that of someone on the South Side of modern Chicago. The police radio chatter superimposed onto this silly recitation of the hard knock ingredients of an impoverished life is a tragically pretentious move, one that swipes yet another piece of Bland’s dignity. It’s too bad; at this stage of his career, that may be the only thing he has left to offer.