American Bus is one of those Italian library LPs that feels like a film you half‑remember seeing on late‑night TV. Credited to Jason Black / Arawak, the record has long been a rarity, passed around on tape dubs and want lists more than on turntables. Its first official reissue by Redi Edizioni, complete with a faithful reproduction of the original artwork, finally puts this elusive session back into circulation and lets its peculiar transatlantic fantasy come into focus.
Everything about American Bus points toward a very specific imaginary: late‑1970s U.S. rock and funk as seen from Italy. The cover photo - shot from inside a bus crossing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge - sets the mood: motion, distance, the sense of watching a mythic America through glass. Musically, that image translates into a blues‑tinged, instrumental funk‑rock palette. Guitars lean on overdriven riffs and clipped chord stabs; the rhythm section locks into straightforward but punchy backbeats; organ and electric piano smear colour around the edges. It’s the sound of bar bands, cop shows and road‑movie montages filtered through the more economical, cue‑based logic of library composition.
A key voice throughout is the saxophone, which repeatedly nudges the material toward the funkier side of the spectrum. On several tracks the horn steps forward with greasy, riff‑based lines or short, barked motifs that double the guitar, tipping grooves into something closer to blaxploitation‑style chase music. Elsewhere it plays in a more melodic, almost plaintive register, underscoring the blues undertow implied in the record’s premise. Because the pieces are built to be modular, themes tend to be concise and hook‑driven, giving the sax plenty of room to stamp character without overstaying its welcome.
The one track that breaks from this prevailing feel is “Lombard Street,” a reggae‑inflected cut named after San Francisco’s famously winding road. Here the band swerves off the funk‑rock highway into a laid‑back, off‑beat lilt: skanking guitar, relaxed drum groove, bass lines that bubble rather than stomp. It’s an intriguing detour, less about strict Jamaican authenticity than about folding another then‑current strain of “American” sound - filtered through global pop - into the album’s travelogue. In the context of the LP, “Lombard Street” plays like a sudden side street, a moment where the bus takes a slower, more irregular route before rejoining the main flow.
What makes American Bus so satisfying, beyond its crate‑digger rarity, is the coherence with which it pursues its concept. Track after track, the record delivers variations on a mood: forward‑moving, slightly gritty, halfway between barroom and blacktop. As with much of the best library music, its supposed functional role becomes an advantage; freed from the need to support lyrics or solos, the pieces focus on groove, texture and immediately legible atmosphere. The new Redi Edizioni reissue not only rescues an overlooked Wild Cat title, it restores a compact, oddly cinematic snapshot of how 1970s Italian studio musicians imagined the sound of an “American bus” rolling across someone else’s dream of California.
