Best Sounding Live recordings,all formats

plus one here. The original Mole release was and is one of my favourites and this embraces the whole run. Wonderful stuff. I ended up getting the cd package too, from america for a ridiculously good value at about £35.

james

http://youtu.be/B0nKJFVVoYM

Hopefully the above hyperlink will take you to a video of Gary Moore playing Freddie King's song, 'The Stumble' recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I don't know if this has been released on CD, but this version is absolutely cooking! If this doesn't get your feet tapping and pulse racing then you may need to see a doctor. Better than FK's original and better than Peter Green's version.

is this the one? 1956.

In an electrifying performance by the band, Gonsalves – who hadn't played the piece in a while, and was initially uncertain of his way around it – played 27 improvised choruses in a raunchily R&B and gospel-inflected manner. It was an astonishing example of a musician playing way out of his skin – and one who had never been in Ellington's front rank of star soloists. The record producer George Avakian said of the Newport crowd: "Halfway through Paul's solo, it had become an enormous, single, living organism." The critic Leonard Feather, reviewing the show for Down Beat magazine, wrote: "Here and there in the reduced, but still multitudinous crowd, a couple got up and started jitterbugging. Within minutes, the whole of Freedom Park was transformed as if struck by a thunderbolt ... hundreds of spectators climbed up on their chairs to see the action; the band built the magnificent arrangement to its perennial peak and the crowd, spent, sat limply wondering what could follow this."

Ellington's faltering reputation was rejuvenated overnight. The show won one of the loudest ovations in Newport festival history, and on the strength of it the bandleader made the cover of Time, the magazine declaring that "the Ellington band was once again the most exciting thing in the business. Ellington himself had emerged from a long period of quiescence, and was once again bursting with ideas and inspiration." That night was to be followed by a new dawn for Ellington's late-period creativity, and the worldwide appeal of his orchestra. It was a momentum destined to be sustained until Ellington's death in 1974.

This is one of my all time favourites