Bob Malone }-- Reviews

READY for some music that makes you feel good? Bob Malone, a blues-tinged, New Orleans-influenced purveyor of roots music will be taking his solo act to the Catskill Mountain Coffeehouse on Saturday night, for an evening of virtuoso piano and unique lyrical wit and humor.

Malone's ability to coax entertaining sound from a keyboard is owed a lot to his early studies of classical music and jazz.

"When I was nine, I started taking classical piano lessons and got really good at it really fast," he explains. "I actually really wanted to be a concert pianist. Then I got my first Billy Joel record and it was over. I decided I wanted to write songs and communicate with people like that. So I started writing songs and playing in bars and doing the whole thing everyone ends up doing, playing every place I could find. Then I went to college at Berklee College Of Music in Boston and got a degree in jazz piano. All through that, I was playing for a living. Afterwards, I put this band together playing my own stuff and we toured all over New England for three or four years, playing all of these horrible places and a few good ones."

NEW ORLEANS music added another twist in his career.

"I started listening to those records, people like Dr. John and Professor Longhair, Huey Smith, Fats Domino and all of those guys," Malone says. "I love that kind of music. I didn't grow up on it because I grew up in New Jersey, but I heard it later on. When I started playing it, it was no effort at all. I instinctively knew how to play that music. It really just had a huge impact on me."

As his career progressed, including two solo CDs and opportunities to tour with and open for Rev. Al Green, Manhattan Transfer, Average White Band, Eric Burdon, Patty Larkin, and many others, his interest in Crescent City music earned him a gig touring with one of the great New Orleans bands of all time.

"I was such a fan of the Neville Brothers," he tells us. "I would always pay to see them play when they were in town. Then I got the gig opening for them. I thought 'This is great - I get to watch them every night!' That was my job. I'd go, play their crowd, then watch them. It doesn't get much better than that."

MALONE'S WRITING abilities are not confined to song lyrics. Recently, he has been keeping visitors to his web site (www.bobmalone.com) entertained with his stories of life on the road.

"Mostly they are road diaries, tales of interesting tours," he says. "Usually, the worse things go, the better the read is. When everything goes smoothly and all the gigs are great and I got paid and everything was just wonderful, there's almost nothing to write about. Some of the stories are about trips that went well but were arduous or interesting in some way... There's this person who runs this magazine in L.A. called the Angel City Voice. She was on my mailing list and kept getting my postcards. They'd always have the little one or two paragraph blurb on them and the other side would advertise the gigs I would be playing. She called me up and said, 'I love these little blurbs that you write. You ought to write something full length and I'll put it in my magazine.'... I was just about to leave on what turned to be the worst tour ever. It was just the worst. I wrote a thing about it. It mostly wrote itself because the tour went so badly the piece couldn't help but be entertaining. She put it in there and I got tons of response for it. I've done a couple of other things for magazines since then, and I have a piece in a book called Working Musicians, which is being put out by HarperCollins this year."

THAT ABILITY to deal with difficult situations through humor is also a big aspect of Malone's music.

"The blues is about talking about things being real bad, but in the process it makes you happy," he says. "That's really the whole point of it."

With that in mind, it's no surprise to learn that his objective in playing live is to make listeners feel good. "I want them to have a good time," Malone explains. "I love watching people smile. I love playing for a crowd that's never seen me before because they don't know what to expect or they're not expecting much. I love to see smiles form on their faces and to hear them laugh. I just want people to feel good. That's what my job is. People have a bad week at work or a bad day or they're fighting with their girlfriend or their boyfriend - they can come see me and I'll try to cheer them up."

Next month, Malone will have another Hudson Valley gig, a shorter performance opening for legendary Chuck Berry pianist (and Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inductee) Johnnie Johnson at the Turning Point in Piermont on March 1.

"When they called me for that, I was like, 'I'm so there! Johnnie is one of my heroes,' he says. "So that's really great. I'll be playing a lot less, opening for Johnnie, but it should be a great show, either way."