An Ineffective Set From Robert Cray Band at Universal

Between being announced at the Universal Amphitheatre Saturday as America’s premier R&B; band and utilizing the Memphis Horns, the Robert Cray Band left plenty of clues that its music owes as much to Southern soul as to straight blues. But the problems during the quintet’s uneven two-hour performance went beyond definitions of musical style or the six (!) broken guitar strings that Cray suffered during the set.

Cray’s effectiveness depends on waging a subtle kind of guerrilla war on blues/soul conventions, in everything from song structure and lyric themes to his spiky, rhythmically unpredictable solos and expressive singing.

The problem is that in a large hall like the Amphitheatre, Cray needs strong material in which all those elements click, because there’s no musical flash or visual dazzle to fall back on. His up-tempo songs hardly qualify as barn-burners, and the moody medium tempo and lack of punch Saturday became enervating. Every song seemed to take the set back to square one.

The terse punctuations of the Memphis Horns added snap and color to the quintet’s Spartan sound. But, during the second hour, only brief, unexpected interludes--Cray’s throat-lacerating gospel growls on one number, a Delta blues duel with guitarist Tim Kaihatsu on another--and his breakthrough hit “Smoking Gun” sustained interest.