About This:
It's a fundamental truth: There are piano men and there are guys who play the piano. And their paths don't cross. And Bob Malone is a piano man. When he plays live, you hear it instantly. It's the real thing. And there's something that happens when you hear the real thing. It's something elemental, something intrinsic, something as surefire fundamental as a force of nature. It's a recognition of real music. And the one thing that Bobby has always had in spades, not to mention diamonds and clubs, is real music. Take the break in the middle of his ode to infidelity, "I Know He's Your Husband," Resounding with the ghosts of ragtime and Dixieland, it's as essentially as American as jazz. It's something he carries around in his vest pocket, close to his heart. The guy's a train. A locomotive. He criss-crosses America time and again. He's the train that keeps going. He cooks on the keys. He can light a piano on fire just with the lightning-slick motion of his hands. His voice is the voice of the city, but also the harbor and the boardwalk. He's known the late night of the soul, so late the sun's already coming up over the old piers. He's got a touch of the Carney in his voice, just a shade of the circus, the sideshows and the carnival. But he also happens to have a heart about as big as Manhattan, so while he gives us the great slinky simmering blues-funk groove of "Like It Or Not" he also turns around and tugs our collective heartstrings with classic love songs like "Valentine’s Day," which are about as romantic as romance gets. He's funny, he's sentimental, he rocks, he shuffles, he jams. He takes on a formidable folk fable like Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" and makes it entirely his own, bending it into a whole new shape. He does it with those elemental chords, the building blocks of ageless blues and eternal jazz. They are the links in a long chain that connects Leadbelly with Little John with Little Richard with Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles with Doctor John with Mose Allison and Bob Dylan and it all leads directly to that place that he lives, where Bob Malone can be found eating blues for breakfast, or nursing a big mug of soul late somewhere between the burnt-orange Angeleno afternoon and the silver-black Manhattan skyline. The Man is connected. He's plugged in. Into that thing you hear when people play and sing who were born to play and sing. God made them that way. They're not out digging ditches or laying bricks because they're on this earth to make the music that gives the ditch-diggers and bricklayers a decent reason to get out of bed in the morning. It's a reason to believe, is what it is, and his music makes believers out of us. To believe that regardless of the cards this world might deal him, he's not going to fold. He’s the train that keeps going. He's the train that keeps hope alive. He's going to give us that great blend, that eclectic electric acoustic amalgamation of sound, of two hands on a piano and one earthy voice in perfect concord. And the ditch-diggers and bricklayers and students of life and the blues will dig what he's doing, and he will deepen their days and brighten their nights. And it might not make life perfect. Or even easy. But it sure goes a long way in making it better. And you can't ask for any more than that. Paul Zollo