As the title of his latest album suggests, Bernard Allison has experienced intense joys and faced serious challenges since his birth in 1965.Highs and Lowsis the reflection of a life punctuated by the jolts of everyday life. He had to fight hard to make a name for himself. Bernard Allison is the son of the late Luther Allison. The imposing aura of his father has long penalized his own artistic development. Irremediably, the comparisons fused and forced him to distinguish himself. At 57, he is finally himself and enjoys hammering it.
From the height of his fifteen albums, Bernard Allison can legitimately affirm that his destiny is today anchored in “The Epic of Black Music”. He can also more easily look back on the past and evoke all those who accompanied him on his multicolored blues journey. There is obviously the father figure, but also all these personalities that he met in the family home including Bobby Rush (89 years old) whom he also invites on his last album. Bernard Allison has thus built a universe that he asserts with force. Steeped in funk, soul-music, he knew how to avoid the pitfall of following in the footsteps of his elders to the point of being only an imprint. His compositions, his tone, his personal choices have thwarted the predictions of the eternal rocks always quick to find the fault of an heir.
Certainly, Bernard Allison received the support of his family, but the life of a musician is not drawn only on the teachings of the past. Encounters, opportunities, intensive practice, countless concerts, forge the spirit and talent of an artist. Could he have confronted Prince’s guitar genius if he hadn’t acquired solid stage experience? He had this privilege, during a birthday ceremony organized in Paisley Park by the master of the place. Bernard Allison has in him this gift of stylistic adaptation which allows him to play with the rhythms and harmonies inherited from the ancestral blues by crushing them as he pleases. The best example was, without a doubt, the album “Funkifinofrom 1995 in which Bootsy Collins-inspired embellishments seemed to dictate the groove orientation of this scintillating repertoire.
A Parisian for a long time, Bernard Allison now lives in Minneapolis in the United States, but he does not hide his nostalgia for the years of apprenticeship in the city of light. He remembers the concerts at the New Morning, his tribute to Jimi Hendrix, his first Franco-American group, the recording of his first album “The Next Generation“. He was, indeed, this young man full of future bearer of a heritage that he had to defend and sublimate. He brilliantly took up this challenge and demonstrated his worth by perfectly mastering an art of which he is one of the universal heirs.
Bernard Allison promises us… He will return to France in 2023 and, why not, to the New Morning in Paris where he made his debut 30 years ago. The celebration is likely to be sparkling!