Dave Liebman & Richie Beirach - Mosaic Select 12 (disc 1)
Easily the highlight disc from this Mosaic Select collection, it features the Lookout Farm live in 76 burning down the house. The collaboration of the recently ex-Miles Davis Band’s horn player with keyboardist Beirach almost perfectly mixed in American and European jazz, fusion and free work, with a definite sense of the East looming in the background in terms of the possibilities of Coltrane’s work Liebman was following up on here. This band really had some serious intuitive power making all the improvisations incredible flights between musicians really driving each other. And to hear them in 76 at what sounds like their peak in maturity is a real gift.
John Patton - Mosaic Select 6 (discs 1-2: Along Came John, The Way I Feel, Oh Baby!)
Patton’s early work expanded the trio he was often part of with Grant Green and Ben Dixon in the 60s adding one or two tenors and a trumpet player. Each album, unsurprisingly, increases in confidence moving through various sessions, the Oh Baby! work with Blue Mitchell on trumpet perhaps the cream of what’s here, but the best of the Patton-named collaborations with Green (such as in Got a Good Thing Goin’) isn’t on the Mosaic Select collaboration, perhaps showing this to be the more collector-oriented material. I thought it all to be confident work, although I’m definitely in my comfort zone when it comes to Green and Patton. I did find, however, that I didn’t pay attention so much to the third disc and will have to get back to it before comments are possible.
Allman Brothers Band - Macon City Auditorium, Macon, GA 2/11/72
It’s incredible to hear the Allman Brothers carry on after the loss of Duane Allman, leaving Dickey Betts alone in the guitar chair, something relatively rare over the long career of this group. That he carries the band throughout the entire show is testament to the band’s strength at this point in their career, playing on a great deal of energy and emotion and really just nailing every song. Of course the trademark dual guitar harmonies are missing, yet it’s as if Allman picks up the pace on the keyboards, the band’s music almost turning into the jazzrock of the times during some of the instrumental flights. It makes the whole show terribly poignant. A chapter in an incredible story, this is a band that really could never be beat down for long and sung in the face of adversity.