Ray Charles

The American media, whose sense of proportion is not their strong point, nicknamed him the genius . Ray Charles Robinson , blind since the age of six, singer , pianist and songwriter by trade, probably didn't ask for that much. A place in the sun of success alongside his brothers who, like him in the early fifties, contributed to elevating the nascent Rythm'n Blues to the rank of authentic popular art would probably have been enough for him, but here our man had something of more than the others, an unsuspected secret weapon: the Gospel , of which he had the audacity and the genius to transpose onto secular scenes the accents, inflections, ecstasies and trances until confined to places of worship.

We will be convinced of this by listening to CD1 , which essentially covers a particularly hot Parisian concert , then we will fall under the spell of CD2 , which offers Ray Charles in his early days, half bluesman , half crooner