Dani Franchi Band - Macallè Blues

Tuesday July 7 th 2015: I am in Celle Ligure (Italy), to the first edition of the Boom! CELLE BLUES FESTIVAL. Four bands in programming, but dining together with Sugar Ray Norcia and his Bluetones has made me lose the first one of the two exhibitions: The Town Brothers with Marco Pandolfi. I apologize! Returning from the dinner, what we find on stage is indeed a beautiful surprise: a young (born in 1990!), but able local guitar player called Dany Franchi. Despite the young age, the boy has already collected a good dose of collaborations, also extra blues as with songwriter and singer Zibba & Almalibre and has opened the gigs of people like Poppa Chubby, Kirk Fletcher, Michael Burks, Jack Bruce, etc. He leads a solid trio, the Dany Franchi Band, formed by other two young and get up to speed musicians like Carlo Dellepiane on bass  and Andrea Tassara on drums. Despite misuses of the trio format and the young age of the guys can make to easily presage much more rock intentions, the surprise is to discover a sound, of course strong, but decidedly blues. The style, is a wise mix of Anson Funderburgh, brothers Vaughn and Albert King, to name a few, but already added with a good dose of personality. Supported by a punctual bassman and a drummer of geometric precision with a magistral touch, among a slow in minor key and a John Lee Hooker kinda boogie, on to the end of his exhibition, here is to arrive the last and, perhaps, the most unexpected of the surprises: Dany Franchi greets us with the reinterpretation of an old ballad: from the first Tom Waits's album, Closing Time, the eternal and underestimated Ol' 55. It raced the year 1973 when that album went out; almost twenty years before Franchi's birth. Waits is by now a piece of history of the American songbook, but in America someone else has already acknowledged Franchi and, therefore, speaking of America and Americans, I like to remember that his second effort I Believe, issued in 2014, has been produced by the guitarist Sean Carney from Columbus, Ohio: the future, we believe, smiles at him!  G.R.