Got Live If You Want

A short survey of several significant live discoveries, including one from Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers

Bessie Jones, John Davis and the Georgia Sea Island Singers: The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert featuring Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young (Smithsonian Folkways)

These evocative, rhythmically intense songs represent a near-direct transmission from the era of slavery in the Southern U.S. They were handed down over many generations by members of the Gullah Geechee culture of the remote St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, and first came to widespread attention during the Folk Revival movement of the early 1960s.

This document, captured by roots music archivist Peter Seigel at New York’s New School in 1965, joins several other Folkways recordings of music from the Sea Islands. It features a fiery singer and astute historian of the culture – Bessie Jones – and a small vocal group doing spirituals, children’s songs, blues and work songs.

Jones and the vocal ensemble animate songs like “Who Built the Ark?” and “Travelin’ Shoes” in exactly the same way they learned them from elders – with just voices and intricate syncopated handclapping. There were no hand drums available to the Gullah Geechee people – the plantation overseers evidently feared them – and as a result, rhythm was provided by clapping, as Jones explains introducing “Handclapping/Cane Fife.”

One delight of this set is hearing Mississippi Fred McDowell perform both solo and with the singing group. His “Going Down to the River” moves with the unmistakable slow cadence of heat weariness. His guitar provides the structural backbone for “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning,” and as he leads the singers through the verses in the manner of a preacher initiating call and response, he sounds just a little bit awed by the sound they’re making together.

Jethro Tull: Live – Bursting Out, The Inflated Edition (Rhino)

Back in the 1970s when bands like Jethro Tull roamed the earth, they weren’t always followed by fancy mobile-recording trucks hired to record each show. Maybe this is a blessing (!), maybe it’s a missed opportunity. One irony of it is that we lack documentation of the freewheeling and extemporaneous music of that era while, nowadays, the big acts routinely compile night-by-night archives of tours whose performances are completely mapped out and nearly improvisation-free. Let’s be real: How much limits-pushing are the Eagles doing on any live version of “Take It To the Limit,” ever?

Turns out there’s little live documentation of Jethro Tull during its heyday in the early ‘70s – no official release of shows around the time of Thick As a Brick (1972) or A Passion Play (1973). Now, at least, there’s a significantly expanded version of the band’s first live set, Live – Bursting Out, from the 1978 European tour for the Heavy Horses album. In the press materials, Ian Anderson had this to say about culling the material for the new expanded set: “The band lineup at this time was a fine-tuned machine and, although missing the unwell John Glascock for the MSG show, it serves as a fine testimony for the many wonderful shows we did in the 70s.”

The primary selling point of the new Bursting Out: The Inflated Edition is the audio, which is freakishly crisp and balanced – the work of producer and recording artist Steven Wilson (the leader of Porcupine Tree), who has been involved in other well-regarded titles in the ongoing Tull reissue campaign. Augmenting the material from the initial release are songs that were cut for time as well as surprisingly vibrant soundcheck recordings. The package contains a hardbound book and a similarly cleaned-up live performance on both CD and DVD from October 1978 at Madison Square Garden.

Even though I’m a Tull agnostic – I get it when people say things like “a little goes a long way” – I’m captivated by The Inflated Edition. It’s a blast, a great primer and summation of the band’s under-appreciated range. For starters, just about everything here displays the band’s unified and downright polished execution; while the compositions aren’t as knotty as contemporaneous works by Frank Zappa, say, it’s still demanding music, and these guys make it roar. Even more striking are the solo features: There are several extended flute spotlights for Ian Anderson, some veering into ancient folk melodies or carols (dig that “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”), and there’s a transfixing version of “Conundrum” that spotlights the exceedingly musical approach of drummer Barriemore Barlow.

Stan Getz Quartet & Astrud Gilberto: Live at the Berlin Jazz Festival 1966 (The Lost Recordings)

As though on cue, the record labels got busy after Astrud Gilberto died in 2023. Verve, her primary U.S. outlet, gathered some of her classic performances into an anthology for its Great Women of Song series, and did straight reissues of titles that have been frequently overlooked – among them Astrud Gilberto with the Walt Wanderley Trio.

By far the most historically significant new release is this 1966 gem from The Lost Recordings, a European label that’s unearthed live performances from the vaults of state radio in France, Germany and elsewhere. It’s from 1966, so well after the “bossa nova craze” but during the period when Gilberto was recording regularly in increasingly lavish (some would say garish) studio orchestra settings.

Recorded live at the Berlin Jazz Festival, this 2-LP package includes a spry instrumental set with Getz leading his touring group – the one featuring inventive vibraphonist Gary Burton (then age 23) and drummer Roy Haynes, which was about to disband – and a full set with Getz’ group supporting Gilberto. [Note: The recording above is the same performance but does not reflect the audio quality of The Lost Recordings release.]

This set reveals the ways both Getz and Gilberto grew in the years since that breakthrough hit album with “The Girl From Ipanema.” Where she initially sounded shy if not frightened, Gilberto here is cool and professionally coy, leaning into the wistful tone of her voice to expand the emotional nuances of  “Corcovado” and “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Getz, meanwhile, begins a few solos by quoting distinctive melodies he played on well-known previous studio recordings, using them as springboards to new improvisations. He’s actually restrained, or at least a bit less boisterously showy, on these versions of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “O Grande Amor” and  “Desafinado.”

Among the highlights of Astrud Gilberto’s portion is “It Might As Well Be Spring,” a bossa-fied treatment of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard. Gilberto and Getz performed this tune frequently (there’s a poorly recorded live version on several Verve compilations) but there’s something sublime about this treatment. Part of that is attributable to Haynes’ streamlined pulse and Burton’s uncanny, tersely beautiful comping, and part is the light touch Gilberto applies to the theme. She seems to toy with this melody, making it sunny one minute and vaguely discontented the next, making it sound like it was meant to be sung by her and only her.  

Wayne Shorter: Celebration (Blue Note, out August 23).

Here’s a live one to look forward to: The first of several planned archival releases by the late saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter.

Celebration documents a 2014 live performance at the Stockholm Jazz Festival with Shorter’s working group – pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade. This quartet operated on a frequency of telepathic invention that stands apart from everything else filed under Jazz – and that frequency was particularly intense in 2014. The teaser track, above, is “Edge of the World,” the end title from the 1983 film War Games.