can't animate MeshRenderer.Material._Color property

Hello all, I'm trying to animate a material color of an object in run-time, I simply want to fade it from a color to another (ex. Black to white).

In the console i get this error as soon as I try to change the color value in the animation inspector :

Getting control 9's position in a group with only 9 controls when doing ExecuteCommand

And if I try to play the animation it just doesn't change the color, but everything else works (it's an articulated anim). While I see this warning in the material inspector :

MaterialPropertyBlock is used to modify this values

But i don't see this property in the animation inspector. Now, I could try animating the material through scripting, maybe I can change color values by lerping or using iTween, but I would prefer doing it through the built-in animation inspector. Is there a way to do it?

In case there is not, could you please give me some directions to take, to do it by scripting? I would like to change the value from/to various colours so it would be useful to create something like a function like

 void switchColor( Color to) { 
         // Color from = Material.color;
         // SomethingLikeLerp(from, to, 1);
 }

But I can't get how to fade to another color by value, since colors have alphanumerical codes.. Thanks in advance for the answers, I already checked other answers, but they all were referred to unity4 or not giving me hints.