As Good As Being There

Roger Ball Recalls Montreux Show Recently Released On Live CD, DVD

By John Voket

Newtowner Roger Ball, co-founder, songwriter and arranger for the Average White Band (AWB), was feeling the star treatment by the time he and his fellow musicians arrived on the shores of lake Geneva to open the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival. Ball and his former band mates are among several acts releasing concert collections this fall that transport music lovers to some of the best live performances available on CD, DVD or Blu-ray — no ticket required.

Reviews of some of those releases appear below.

Average White Band-Live at Montreux, 1977 showcases all of the numbers performed live that evening. And while not a jazz band by definition, AWB’s arrival in Montreux heralded a fundamental shift in the performance roster of what remained at least in name, a jazz festival.

Although that international showcase of top musical talent originated about a decade earlier with a much tighter focus on classic jazz performances, festival founders Claude Nobs, Géo Voumard and René Langel had been receiving increasing support and influence on their programming from brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegün of Atlantic Records who had a vested interest in promoting all the performers signed to that label.

So to a great extent, Ball said, 1977 was more of an Atlantic Records Festival presenting a mixture of acts including his own band’s horn driven funk, R&B and jazz rock. It was also infamous as the longest running Montreux festival — clocking in at 23 days — and represented the year the event permanently diversified from strictly jazz to a more eclectic variety of live acts.

AWB shared the stages of the newly rebuilt Montreux Casino that year with a fresh young blues player named Bonnie Raitt, rocker Rory Gallagher, crooner Ben E. King as well as jazz greats Michael Brecker, Herbie Mann and David “Fathead” Newman.

Ball said Atlantic Producer Arif Mardin even arranged an extended jam section for AWB’s big million selling hit “Pick Up The Pieces” to put more of a spotlight on Ball and fellow sax man Malcolm “Molly” Duncan, collectively referred to as “The Dundee Horns” in honor of their home town in Scotland.

“Arif did that arrangement for the middle section that was quite a accomplishment. He was a very famous producer at the time. He did [arrangements and production for] Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles,” Ball said. “We were all in Montreux at the time, and somebody came up with the idea to extend the song, and Arif made it up it in an evening. It was quite amazing. Phil Collins just recorded that same version with Arif conducting.”

Being at the height of their popularity, Ball said AWB members regularly flew from gig to gig on Lear jets, including a large aircraft that was owned by and borrowed from John Denver when he was not on the road himself.

“We had two Lear jets for that gig as a matter of fact because John Denver needed his for some reason,” Ball said. “It was pretty cool looking out the window at 40,000 feet and seeing the other jet and the guys looking back. We were flying high in more ways that one. We got the star treatment.”

When the band arrived at the five-star hotel adjacent to the Montreux Casino, they found an invitation to come up to Nobs’ palatial home, where the band enjoyed watching films of some of the preceding festival artists in the jazz festival founder’s own huge in-house theater.

Ball also recalled having “the best meal of my life,” one evening during the festival when Ahmet Ertegün rented an entire restaurant and threw a private multi-course dinner party for all of his Atlantic artists. Besides “Pick Up The Pieces,” Ball also contributed his arrangement of the song “Sweet and Sour” to the Montreux recording.

But he also noted that there was a missing element to the recording. Since the set was about one song too short to fill both sides of a record album, Ball said AWB was later called into the studio to record one additional number to round out the project. But it has since dropped from the playlist on the new CD and DVD release.

“Atlantic didn’t want to put (the live album) out — they didn’t think there was enough material. So we got as many of the original guys as possible together in New York to record a song called “Bahia (Na Baixa Do Sapateiro),” Ball said. “Michael Brecker did a solo. It’s a shame that was not on there, it was a really high quality recording. And they never said on the original album that that song was recorded in a studio. They just slipped it on there with an applause track to make it sound like we did it live at the festival.”

The new AWB in Motreux CD and DVD also features the Top-40 hit “Cut the Cake,” as well as the band’s popular cover of the Isley Brothers “Work to Do,” and a funky cover of “Heard it Through The Grapevine.”

Some of the other outstanding live releases from Eagle Rock Records that have hit in recent weeks include:

B-52s Heart Valentine’s Day

On October 11, Eagle Rock released With The Wild Crowd! – Live In Athens, GA, the first official B-52s live album. Capturing the band’s hometown show in Athens, Ga., in February 2011, the recording commemorates the B-52s’ 34th anniversary of their first-ever live show on Valentine’s Day 1977. 

The CD is treasure trove of hits and album cuts for fans who will love the retrospective, presented with great enthusiasm that is particularly evidenced on “Private Idaho,” “Party Out of Bounds,” and the explosive “52 Girls,” all featuring the tight and sometimes haunting dissident harmonies of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson.

The CD also features live renditions of the B-52s biggest hits, “Love Shack” and “Roam,” both of which were propelled to international audiences via MTV making the band a household name for much of the early to mid 1980s.

Other notable cuts include “Ultraviolet,” “Rock Lobster” and “Planet Claire,” featuring Keith Strickland’s twangy guitar and Fred Schneider and his droll but entertaining best.

Counting Crows Captured

The recent release of Counting Crows - August And Everything After-Live At Town Hall is offered on CD, Blu-Ray and DVD. The show may have been so widely circulated because last year’s New York front-to-back performance of the 1993 album August And Everything After, which sold over 7 million copies in the US, apparently stands among the greatest concerts ever played according to band members.

No matter which format you choose, the incredible tightness and musicianship that has consistently been a hallmark of Counting Crows live performances resonates. This is clearly proof that the raw talent evidenced on the band’s debut two decades ago was just a shadow of what would become one of America’s more underrated but highly anticipated touring outfits.

Frontman and primary songwriter Adam Duritz works the crowd like a room full of his own best friends, and perhaps that show was well populated with devotees. But listening to him transition from the sometimes mindless banter to the perfectly phrased vocals intertwined with stellar guitar and string work from David Bryson, David Immergluck and Dan Vickrey borders on magical.

The recording highlights this interplay right from the opening notes of “Round Here/Raining In Baltimore,” also highlighting wonderful keyboard work from Charles Gillingham. The CD’s only deviation from the original album’s formula comes on “Rain King,” when the band envelopes Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” much to the delight of screaming fans who were probably hoping to hear the rare in-concert mash-up.

“Perfect Blue Buildings” and “Sullivan Street” are both embellished with introductory remarks from Duritz, which help less familiar listeners appreciate how the gifted songwriter cobbles together personal experiences to achieve these affecting narratives through this particularly effective type of  self-administered therapy.

Preview a selection here.

Pleasant Tangerine Dream

Having seen Tangerine Dream in New have in 1988, I was always disappointed that these frontrunners of New Age music were so poorly represented as a live act by their “Live Miles” project, which combined audio from several 1986 and 1987 shows with synthesizer overdubs added in studio. But now, the band’s latest release, Live in America 1992, finally does justice to what this keyboard-fueled quartet could do outside the confines of a recording studio.

By the time this American tour was mounted, technology had evolved to the point where both the audio and video is quite spectacular, providing an atmospheric experience no matter which format a listener or viewer may choose.

The 1992 lineup featured founder Edgar Froese, Froese’s son Jerome on keys and guitar, guitarist Zlatko Perica, and keyboard/sax player Linda Spa.

Promoting their album Rockoon, and hitting their quarter-century mark as a band, Tangerine Dream moves through a history of their contributions to international electronica, sampling “Logos,” “Phaedra,” and “Love On A Real Train,” popularized to young American audiences on the Risky Business movie soundtrack.

The band also covers the Hendrix classic “Purple Haze,” but it is a disposable extra that fans may just want to skip past.

Visit www.NewtownBee.com and find this story on The Bee’s Features page, where links within this story offer previews of the AWB, Counting Crows and Tangerine Dream releases.