Speaking of live….

Yet another mix of completely transportive live performances....

One bit of Live News that escaped attention in the weeks before the election: The release of Duane Allman’s last performance with the Allman Brothers Band, just 12 days before he died in a motorcycle accident. We owe the discovery to one Sam Idas, who was working as a radio journalist at the time. He brought a cassette recorder to interview the band, and decided to record what he could of the show on the flip side of a 60-minute tape.

The Final Note: Live at Painter’s Mill Music Fair 10-17-71 contains seven songs, including the “One Way Out” that’s on this Spotify playlist, rendered in predictably smudgy audio quality. The source tape was cleaned up digitally; it’s clear enough to show that the Allmans’ legendary Fillmore East dates, recorded in March of 1971, were not flukes: Especially in this configuration, the band summoned a relentless, firebreathing cohesion every night.

I set out to make a playlist that included works from the three live records I mentioned the other day. But Spotify doesn’t yet have all of the Sonny Rollins discovery from 1967, Rollins In Holland – the only available track is a studio track. So I’ve included “Softly As in a Morning Sunrise” from the landmark Live at the Village Vanguard instead. After hearing competent, if fairly sterile, live streams from that venue and others during the pandemic, it’s nice to hear music being made in a busy club, with glasses clinking and all the rest. Performers have a valid point when they argue that too much of that “random” sound can interfere with music-making. But in our particular moment, that stuff, the sound of everyday ordinary human interaction, feels welcome.

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