Cream -  ”Trinity,” Marquee Club, Soho, London 5/23/67

Long before there were jesters and facepaint, Cream played the venerable Marquee Club, probably on multiple occasions. Readers may have guessed that I’m utterly fanatic when it comes to this period of the band (or I’ll revise that by the end of this entry), when this trio were one of the very best live bands in existence. Apparently they weren’t quite there yet based on this May show, maybe a few months off before they hit the United States and proceeded to annihilate crowds with their fantastic songs and powerful jams. For one thing, this Trinity recording is just horrible, muffled to the point that it shouldn’t have been propagated at all. It doesn’t even hurt as the band didn’t seem to be too inspired this night. There’s better elsewhere.

Bancco del Mutuo Soccorso - Rio Art Rock Festival 2000 (video)

I think the one and only time I saw Banco was around this time, at the final Progfest. As you can tell by popping over to Gnosis, this is a band that is enormously popular for progressive rock fans as they have a musical sophistication and melodic and dramatic balance that tends to hit just about everyone’s buttons. Although, I must say music like this tends to be just a bit too high drama for my normal moods, and it takes some adjustment for me to get into now, in fact it took about an hour or so into this two hour video, where the band gets really deep into the old classics, for me to start paying a lot of attention, and most of it was due to Nocenzi’s (Vittorio? I’m not looking this up…) ambidextrous keyboard playing. I mean he’s fantastic, really fantastic, the kind of shit that would make Rick Wakeman sit down for a bit. Overall I’m not sure Banco have perfectly made the transition to modern band, in that some of the tones, especially in the guitars and drums kind of overwhelm the music, which is so ornate and elaborate that it takes a bit of attention to pick up on it all.

Herbie Hancock - Strata Concert Gallery, Detroit, MI 2/20/73

This is one sprawling, epic, Sextant era-show, from FM soundboard and served in chunks as short as 11 1/2 minutes all the way to 42 and change, the whole show closing in on close to three hours in length. If you’re a fan it’s enough to lose bladder control and I might have if the show didn’t take its time to get going. Everything here moves in long periods of time, in fact in listening to this it’s just an incredible change in style for him to go in the Headhunters direction, as this is Hancock about as out as he ever got. For one thing, that is if you can really say just one thing about a show of this length and of this spectrum, the band is basically still jazz, but there are electronics and instrumental pallettes that identify this as something really cosmic. There’s Eddie Henderson blowing over the top, but to hear the band so free below him implies directions more expressed in Henderson’s own post Mwandishi solo albums than in Hancock’s own recorded work. In many ways this isn’t even a reflection of Sextant, which is so much more focused and lush, while this has so much room that the musicians improvise for long periods before coming back to anything familiar. Is there more of this stuff? Because there appears to be so much more to the Mwandishi>Sextant>Headhunters arc than appears on paper. This is a real revelation!