One of several recordings issued by the Art Ensemble’s own label and the only one to document the group as a whole, Kabalaba is a live, 1974 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival by the same augmented band (with the addition of Muhal Richard Abrams) that recorded the superb Fanfare for the Warriors album for Atlantic. While not as heady as that release, Kabalaba offers a typical example of the Art Ensemble’s live concerts from around that time.
There are several percussion interludes and solo horn features interspersed among stronger thematic pieces such as Theme for Sco, which gets an energetic workout here. Roscoe Mitchell produces an especially acerbic solo alto piece, Improvization A2 [sic], all gnarls and bitter…
Category: live
As the name implies, Fanny were an uncompromising, take no prisoners, no holds barred, rock ‘n’ roll outfit who tried to grab the music business by the scruff of the neck and squeeze it dry in the early to mid 1970’s. The fact that they were women didn’t seem to bother them… but it certainly bother “the business”.
Formed by sisters June (guitar & vocals) and Jean (bass & vocals) Millington in the late 60’s and signing to Reprise Records in 1969 they were joined by Alice de Buhr (drums & vocals) and Nickey Barclay (keyboards & vocals) to record debut, Fanny (1970), and follow ups, Charity Ball (1971), Fanny Hill (1972), and Mothers Pride (1973), before June and Alice jumped ship triggering a move to Casablanca Records in 1974.
“This is our last concert, ever. And we’d love to do you for now on our last concert ever…” After the words peter out, a ragged, yet blistering, five-minute version of “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction” explodes from the stage. Show over, The Rolling Stones leave Hawaii’s Honolulu International Center to…what?
It’s not as noteworthy a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry as David Bowie’s 3 July 1973 announcement at the Hammersmith Odeon that “not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.” Or even George Harrison’s “that’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore” comment after playing San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966 – what turned out to be The Beatles last-ever (conventional) live show. But it was unequivocal. On 28 July 1966, Mick Jagger told the audience…
Few bands feel as tied to their hometown mythology as The Flaming Lips, so it makes perfect sense that their full-album performance of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots would eventually circle back to Oklahoma City. Recorded on August 30, 2024 at the Zoo Amphitheater, this release captures a band revisiting its early-2000s peak with both affection and a steadier, lived-in sense of timing.
After an introduction by the mayor of OKC thanking the band for their contribution to the city, the Lips launch into “Fight Test,” which establishes the tone immediately. The rhythm section sits heavier than on the studio version, and Steven Drozd’s keyboard work gives the song a low, steady hum that pushes the chorus forward. “One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21” follows with a gentle lift…
Emma Tricca’s Prisms of Winter is an intimate recording — a collection of twelve stripped‑down live recordings that feel less like a performance and more like a whispered conversation between artist and listener. Recorded in London’s backrooms and scattered studios, the album is suffused with a quiet magic, and the kind of intimacy that makes you lean in closer, as though Tricca were singing directly into your ear.
This is Tricca at her most vulnerable and poetic. By paring back the arrangements, she exposes the bare bones of her songs — the words, the voice, the guitar — and in doing so, reveals their timeless strength. The immediacy of the recordings creates a sense of closeness, as if each track were a secret shared in confidence.
In November 2025, producers Zev Feldman and George Klabin’s Resonance Records released two unissued live recordings by Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Vibrations in the Village: Live at the Village Gate is the first, captured live in 1963. The tapes were cut for a documentary soundtrack about Kirk’s life, which was never made. The tapes survived for more than 60 years in the care of engineer Ivan Berger. When Feldman received them, he initially contacted saxophonist James Carter who, impressed, made the case for release. Feldman then contacted Kirk’s indomitable widow Dorthaan Kirk (whose wonderful liner essay here is titled “My Life with Rahsaan”); she enthusiastically approved.
Recorded over two nights in November 1963, Kirk used three different pianists:…
In November 2025, producers Zev Feldman and George Klabin’s Resonance Records released two unissued live recordings by Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Seek & Listen: Live at the Penthouse is the second. A double disc, it was recorded in 1967. Kirk’s band included pianist Ron Burton, bassist Steve Novosel, and drummer Jimmy Hopps in 11 selections. The set opens at the tail-end of the rowdy “The Jump Thing,” then gives way to Burt Bacharach’s and Hal David’s “Alfie.” Burton embellishes Kirk’s gorgeous tenor lines with graceful elegance as the rhythm section walks behind him. “Mingus-Griff Song” is an original. At over 12 minutes, this band fires on all cylinders. Whether Kirk is playing tenor, manzello, stritch, flutes, or whistles, his creative intensity is total. Tenor sings…
There’s J.D. Salinger, there’s Thomas Pynchon, and then there’s Takashi Mizutani, founder, singer and guitarist of Japanese psychedelic rock giants Les Rallizes Dénudés. How and why could someone so obviously gifted, perhaps even touched by the divine, remove themselves from a world that not only inspires their art but adores it? This question plagued some of the most dedicated and maniacal record collectors in the world, the deepest heads with the most fried and obscure psych rock platters, until 2021 when The Last One Musique and Temporal Drift opened the floodgates and let the music stream forth. It’s curious to think that if Mizutani had emerged from hiding before his death in 2019, perhaps he might have enjoyed the exposure, much in the way…
Before Chat Pile took on sold-out tours and widespread critical acclaim, they played Roadburn 2023-their biggest show to date, in front of a packed room of 3,000 on the festival’s main stage. Fresh off the release of God’s Country, the Oklahoma quartet brought their suffocating, sludgy noise rock to Tilburg for their first-ever European performance, delivering a set that felt like a milestone. The bleakness, the anguish, the raw absurdity-it all scaled up effortlessly, proving that Chat Pile’s chaos could consume any audience, no matter the size.
The set was recorded by the Roadburn staff and later remixed by the band’s longtime engineer, Jared Stimpfl, capturing the full weight of the performance. The result is something both…
The Philadelphia collective Untethered embraces what its drummer Grant Calvin Weston calls “spontaneous creative composition,” which is another way of saying that the music the quartet plays is fully improvised. You could say that the group is making music from thin air, but that discounts the years of experience its members have spent listening, growing, and inventing.
So the air is quite thick, actually, teeming with countless elements from which their groove-oriented music draws. Weston, of course, is a deeply seasoned marvel, a musician who at 17 became a member of Prime Time, the paradigm-shifting electric band of the legendary saxophonist, composer, and thinker Ornette Coleman. He has gone on to work with…
…features 9 tracks of unedited live performance, including pieces that became parts of his seminal ‘World of Echo’ album.
It is testament to the astral, prolific talent of Arthur Russell that two decades after the first reissues of his archival material garnered widespread acclaim, crystals of such high quality are still being unearthed. 2023’s Picture of Bunny Rabbit and 2019’s Iowa Dream hinted at the depth and breadth of what remains unheard in the Arthur Russell Archives, but it is perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for a high-quality live recording to see the light of day. 2020’s Sketches for World of Echo: June 25 1984 Live at Ei and 2021’s 24 to 24 Music Live at the Kitchen both went some way to unravelling the enigma,…
2025 mix by Jon Altschiller.
As we enter 2026, who could have imagined the Bruce Springsteen Live Archive series would be entering its twelfth year? The first show in the series, Apollo Theater, March 9, 2012, was released in November 2014; remarkably, 100 more have followed, expanding Springsteen’s live recording canon into territory once exclusive to the Grateful Dead.
Tours from 1975 on are represented in that 100, with many covered in depth. Frustratingly to all, a few gaps remain, limited by technical challenges (#freetherisingtour) and tape availability. But the Archive series is open-ended: new sources and playback breakthroughs remain ever possible.
For this year’s holiday release, we revisit…
It takes a lot of time, money, and dedication, to restore anything of historical importance. And the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs, California was just the type of venue that required these three key ingredients. Opened to the public for the first time in 1936, this classic Art Deco building was the site of many grand events over the past 100 years.
And so it was on November 11, 2022, spearheaded by Brian Ray (Sir Paul McCartney’s guitar gunslinger for the past 20+ years), a gala fundraiser was held to restore one of Palm Springs’ most treasured landmarks, the historic Plaza Theatre.
Ray and his co-musical director Spike Edney (Queen, Clapton, Elton, Aretha) put together an all-star band to back the four headliners for the evening’s show. And what headliners…
Osees have released their new live album, Live at the Broad Museum via Deathgod Records. Album captures a dynamic live performance at The Broad museum in Los Angeles. The record features extended tracks that highlight the band’s improvisational energy, including a standout 22-minute jam, “I Got a Lot.” Unlike their tightly structured studio recordings, this album explores krautrock-inspired grooves, hypnotic rhythms, and experimental soundscapes, showcasing the band’s versatility and adventurous live presence.
The album is mixed by frontman John Dwyer and mastered by JJ Golden, emphasizing the raw, immersive quality of the performance. Critics praise it as a document of Osees’ live power, capturing moments of spontaneous creativity…
November 1978. Henry Cow disbands after a decade of music that redefined the boundaries of experimental rock. November 2022. Four founding members return to the stage. Not to look back – but to improvise the present. Fred Frith (guitar, violin, electronics), Tim Hodgkinson (keyboards, saxophone, lap steel, electronics), Chris Cutler (drums, percussion), John Greaves (bass, vocals): the original core reunited under the name Henry Now. The key is in the name – as Clive Bell noted in The Wire, this is not a nostalgia project.
No scores. No prepared material. Only the instinct honed over fifty years of sonic exploration. For many, the music of Henry Cow represented a transformative listening experience…
…includes the full live album, plus four additional tracks.
To celebrate his 2024 sold-out Luck and Strange tour, David Gilmour is releasing his third solo live album, titled The Luck and Strange Concerts. Gilmour was feeling reinvigorated this tour as he played the new album in its entirety, along with a host of his Pink Floyd classics.
The live album offers up 23 songs captured from various dates throughout the brief tour, during which Gilmour played only 21 concerts in Rome, London, Los Angeles, and New York. The compilation release is designed exactly as the show was presented with the songs played in the same order. The album’s pristine audio is part of Gilmour and company’s appeal, as every note…
Amir ElSaffar has been having a good year. After launching his label, Maqam Records (named after the Middle Eastern musical language that employs a microtonal tuning system), the trumpeter released an album by legendary Iraqi Maqam vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi, and, for the imprint’s second album, ElSaffar teamed up with three other musicians for a stunning new live album that places Maqam in a modern jazz setting.
New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal features ElSaffar, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, saxophonist Ole Mathisen, and pianist Tania Giannouli, performing as part of a mini-residency of two rehearsal days, a concert, and an all-day recording session at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. What ended up on the record is not the studio…
In 2025 Dave Matthews Band hit the road for their 34th year of bringing their infectious energy to the stage. Live Trax Vol. 72 is from the second night of the bands two night stand in Chicago and captures a spotless and emotional performance from The Stones first notes to Pigs big finish. The creative and varied setlist includes songs like the powerful What You Are and Madmans Eyes as well as Daves haunting vocal deliveries on Gravedigger and Rye Whiskey.
Night two kicked off even bigger than the first, as “The Stone” worked the crowd into a frenzy and was immediately followed by “So Right”. The band leaned more into its newer material on Saturday, but still brought plenty of staples like “What You Are”, “You Might Die Trying”, “Blackjack”…
The National brings an abundance of energy for a brooding, middle-aged indie rock band, as evidenced on their new live album, Rome.
The 21-track, two-LP album — recorded in concert at the Parco della Musica auditorium in Italy’s capital in June — is a fan-friendly sing-along that strings together some of the best sounds of their 25-year career.
Eight of the band’s 10 studio albums are represented in Rome, releasing Friday from this Ohio-born and New York-based quintet fronted by the gravel-voiced Matt Berninger and fueled by two sets of brothers: Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Bryan and Scott Devendorf.
The opener, “Runaway,” is one of a handful of deeper cuts, this one from the lyrically dreary…
Jan Akkerman in a live setting is a beautiful thing to behold, and on his new record, My Focus: Live Under the Rainbow, you can absorb his technical mastery and tone, where it was born to live – on stage.
Live music needs to offer you something that you cannot get on a studio recording. It’s the sense of freedom and intimacy, wondering how the songs will be played and what the reaction will be. Live concerts give you the tingle where the hair stands up on the back of your neck. “Live audiences give you the tension and responsibility to be creative, for me that’s the challenge I like,” says the iconic Dutch guitarist. After all of these years, you ponder what keeps Jan going out there, night after night. “It’s my love to play for people all around…