So I"m from the DMV. Go-go is our homegrown product.

It loses something in the studio. Studio versions of go-go's biggest hits just never hit the same. Last studio go-go version of a song that went over huge was Da Butt.

Go-go is just best played and consumed live. Periodt.

Could a musical genre, any musical genre, make it with artists just doing live albums? Could any artist make it doing nothing but live albums?

What's the resistance to more artists doing live albums more often? Most only put out a live joint here and there, or after they've been around ten years.

hm.
______________________________________________________________________________

"To Each His Reach"

but.....

Fuck aliens.

*skatin' the rings of saturn*


..and miles to go before i sleep...

Yeah set up for good sound in a live space isn’t cheap but recording at most 2 concerts to combine together versus paying for multiple studio sessions and paying studio musicians and engineers etc for a whole album?

Live might be cheaper.

the engineer is going to have considerably more work. also, you're (or should be) paying the musicians. not to mention all the prep work that would need to be in place so the songs are ready to record live. you might see a little bit of dollar savings but it comes with lots and lots of extra coordination and work.

the biggest thing to me is, and most obvious reason as to why we don't see more live albums, is that the artist may not want a live version! especially if you have any electronic or digital elements, those will hit very different live than in the studio.

Just meant doing it twice live for recording is gonna be less time you have to pay for than in theory multiple hours on recording studios possibly doing it over and over again.

I think of Erykah and Jill’s live albums back in the day.

The touring group of musicians and artists I’m sure were at it for months before they recorded the live version for an album. So they are set there in terms of knowing the songs and sounding perfect musicianship wise.

Other than getting audio equipment in place to make sure that everything sounds good (could be taken care of during a sound check really, maybe 2?) what additional prep is there really?

able to make those live albums. if you're asking if an act that has a consistent band and tours regularly, which is not most, then yes, it might just be easier.

but that's not most folks. you are kind of oversimplifying what it takes to record a really good sounding live recording. the engineering is going to be much more complicated in a live setting, for one.

the simplest way i would put it is, if it was easier to do live albums that met the quality standards of a studio-recorded LP, many more acts would already be doing it.

EDIT: and ditto to what PROMO said. do you want to hear Biggie rhyming "Notorious Thugs" live as the official version? I do not.

I think it depends on the artist.

but I have to agree with lightworks on the actual live recording. It’s prolly cheaper than a studio album

Robert Randolphs first album was live at the Wetlands. I was there. A lot of cables but it wasn’t like it was some elaborate set up.

Definitely works better for bands than hip hop artist.

Re this:

>the simplest way i would put it is, if it was easier to do
>live albums that met the quality standards of a
>studio-recorded LP, many more acts would already be doing it.

And this:

>EDIT: and ditto to what PROMO said. do you want to hear Biggie
>rhyming "Notorious Thugs" live as the official version? I do
>not.

A (dumb) blanket statement like “well if it was that easy everyone would be doing it!” and saying you wouldn’t prefer a live version of a track even if everyone could aren’t even connected points!

Also that’s like not even the point of the original post, which was why aren’t they being done more, not “how would you feel about hearing a new song as a live version versus studio?”

Look, I wore Jay-Z’s MTV Unplugged CD out.

And Jill has put out literally 3 live CDs.

Different artists like different things, so regarding your first point just because it is relatively easy to pull off doesn’t mean that artists should be doing it if they just don’t want to do live albums.

Regarding if I want to get to know a live version as the official version out there for a particular song, I mean why not? The world only knows of Erykah’s “Tyrone” through her live version and it is a cult classic, the longevity of the song enduring isn’t lessened because we first heard it via a live album.

In conclusion, live albums don’t cost that much to make, and more artists should make them if they so chose.

..would've made a lot more sense if you just stopped right there.



*skatin' the rings of saturn*


..and miles to go before i sleep...

or someone guessing


LOL

this is the same as people doing those back of the napkin coronavirus calculations

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

centers around speculating and discussing things folks have no direct involvement in (politics, celebrities, etc) and yet you wanna pull MY coat for having the audacity to give my thoughts on something that I’m just thinking out loud about, like everyone who ever posts here is doing?

And that I’m not even presenting as facts, just giving my opinion on, ready for folks to agree or disagree and that’s okay?

Wack.

many of your comments have been written in a pretty authoritative way that only someone who has experience working with an artist has the expertise to position the statements that way.

..which is fine, I guess.

All that other nonsense about "message board culture" and blah blah blah?

The OP asked a specific question regarding why live albums aren't the norm. As someone with years of experience, I responded with one of the obvious answers. She shows up with "..I don't know about that..." and proceeds to prove that she knows absolutely nothing about recording an album (live or otherwise).

Its probably not a good idea for her to jump into a dialogue when she has nothing substantial to offer, but she seems to think the responses to her are unwarranted.

*shrug*


*skatin' the rings of saturn*


..and miles to go before i sleep...

if you feel like your guess is relevant enough to enter against actual experience and informed opinion, then...I'm not sure where I'm stopping you.



www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

every now and then, something would work. however, I preferred studio versions of I'm listening to albums.

lives work best to me when you get the full experience of being at the show. with that said....this is hard, https://youtu.be/55NUqrrBccw

To get the full feel, I’d probably take a tour film, with some studio footage and phasing into the best performance of that record on the tour. Or maybe pick the best performance date from the whole tour.

I know I have more than one John Mayer live album because bruh charges out the ass when he comes to Atlanta on tour.

I actually like Lauryn Hill Unplugged more than the Miseducation album.

I love Devin the Dude’s intro to Dre’s “Fuck You” from the Up In Smoke tour.

as a live recording....

and they are trash because usually people wanna hear the song as recorded and you can't create studio magic live.

ALSO, many artists can't fucking perform live.

so, yeah, there's your answer.

>ALSO, many artists can't fucking perform live.
>
>so, yeah, there's your answer.

It takes a really strong artist to be able to deliver live. And even some of the best artists who kill it live still don't sound as good as they do in the studio - their breath control is off, their sense of pitch doesn't stand up when listening back to the recording, etc.

That being said, some of my absolute favorite albums are live. Donny Hathaway Live, James Brown Live at the Apollo, Aretha Franklin Live at Fillmore West, The Roots Come Alive (talking about breath control? BT kills this...), Erykah Badu Live, etc...

I'm salty that Stevie Wonder hasn't released a live album/video from the Songs in the Key of Life tour. Seeing that live was the best live music experience I've ever had. Amazing from start to finish. I thought for CERTAIN they'd release a live album so I could experience some of that magic again, but all I have is YouTube videos from people's cell phones.

Not a coincidence that many of the best live albums are jazz albums. Especially the ones performed in intimate, club settings.

In general, live albums aren't the norm because a lot of what makes a live performance special is being present, there, in the audience. And a lot of that energy doesn't translate the way it should to record material. It's the rare ones that day.

And bear in mind, with many of the best live soul albums (like James Brown's many Live at the Apollo's) or rock albums (like Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense"), they're pulled together from multiple live performances over three or four nights. So often in these cases, it's not like you're hearing a whole live show front to back.

that you just won’t get with a hip hop album.

About 40% of the gospel albums are basically live albums, not a lot of people really pay attention to it and most of the time they don't really advertise on the album that's it's live, when it comes to those big choir groups, it's usually a live album though; when it's a smaller group like one artist, a duo, or a small band, then it's just the everyday studio album.

https://damuthefudgemunk.bandcamp.com/album/ocean-bridges

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/how-jazz-legend-archie-shepp-his-nephew-raw-poetic-and-a-cast-of-dc-musicians-teamed-up-for-an-experimental-improvised-album/2020/05/21/9d6e359c-991a-11ea-a282-386f56d579e6_story.html

How jazz legend Archie Shepp, his nephew Raw Poetic and a cast of D.C. musicians teamed up for an experimental improvised album

By
Natalie Weiner
May 22, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. MDT
When Jason Moore, the D.C. rapper and producer who works under the moniker Raw Poetic, first started writing rhymes as a teenager, he had a specific goal in mind. “I wanted to be able to rap to anything, not just a hip-hop beat,” he says, explaining that he’d work out bars atop music from Nirvana and Radiohead along with more conventional hip-hop fare.

That proved to be a much easier task, though, than rhyming along to recordings by his uncle, legendary jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. “His stuff was very avant-garde, and challenging to the ear and mind to keep up with — but it was really important to me, just because I knew it was my blood,” says Moore, now 41. “I think it got me ready for what we just did.”

The lessons he learned from Shepp’s records were finally put to use last year, when Moore and his octogenarian uncle officially collaborated for the first time during one marathon session at Blue Room Productions in Herndon, Va. The result is “Ocean Bridges,” a fully improvised album on which Moore, Shepp and DJ/producer/drummer/vibraphonist Damu the Fudgemunk (a.k.a. Earl Davis), along with several hip-hop and jazz scene stalwarts of the D.C. region, tap into both of those genres’ more experimental sides and ultimately find a sound that isn’t fully aligned with either one.

Recording with Shepp is an opportunity that Moore, who’s spent the past two decades active as both a soloist and with live hip-hop band RPM (Restoring Poetry in Music) and duo Panacea, has been working toward essentially since he was just practicing along with Shepp’s vast, storied catalogue.

They recorded together once before, when Moore was 18 and just starting out, and it was an experience that left Moore in awe. “Like, damn — I got work to do,” he remembers thinking. “ told me, ‘Keep working on it, keep developing your style, and one day you’ll be ready.’ So it’s been literally 20 years of me working on something, and when he’d call and ask about music I’d send it to him and he’d say, ‘Yeah, you’re getting better.’ That was his whole thing: ‘You’re getting better.’ ”

“I was just waiting for a chance,” Shepp insists. “I find Jason’s poetry quite compelling, and original — because it is poetry. They call it rap, but it’s more than that.” Unlike many of his peers, Shepp has long embraced poetry and hip-hop as an intuitive part of what he prefers to call African American music. While he was a theater major at Goddard College in Vermont, Shepp started reading E.E. Cummings and T.S. Eliot, and realized “that poetry and literature could add another dimension to my expression,” as he puts it.

Then, as an avant-gardist living in New York in the mid-1960s, Shepp fell in with a politically minded group of artists and thinkers that included Amiri Baraka (then still known as LeRoi Jones) and James Baldwin — Baraka even wrote his liner notes. Shepp’s insistence that his activism and his art are inextricably linked — “It’s always been my belief that I should say something that connects to the oppression of African Americans, of my people,” he says of his work now — lent itself to incorporating, composing and occasionally performing poetry as part of albums such as 1965’s “Fire Music” and, perhaps most memorably, 1972’s “Attica Blues,” making the subject of his dissent explicit as well as abstract.

Today, he sees how that early experimentation with poetry and music helped pave the way for hip-hop — for his nephew’s art. “The black experience in music has become something else, as much poetry as it is musical expression,” says Shepp. “I had the privilege and pleasure to work with the Last Poets while I was in France, which made me aware not only of who they are but how in my own small way I might have helped them to become who they are. Certainly I wasn’t the only one, but to listen to my nephew carrying on this expression is really inspiring to me.”

Tapping into that inheritance was important not only for Moore, but also for his longtime friend and collaborator Damu the Fudgemunk — a D.C. native who shares a name with his grandfather Earl Davis, a musician who befriended Wayne Shorter when they were serving in the Army together. He’s been sampling jazz as a beatmaker for years and listening to it for even longer thanks to his family of musicians, but had never recorded live improvisation as part of a group of instrumentalists.

“It’s kind of an escape from being a hip-hop producer, because everything is more premeditated — you’re programming things, you lose some of the spontaneous element,” says Davis, 35. Getting in the studio was a little easier thanks to the fact that most of the band, which included bassist Luke Stewart, guitarist Pat Fritz and keyboardist Aaron Gause, had already jammed together either casually or as part of any number of D.C.-area ensembles, but it was still uncharted territory.

“I was like, this dude is so far ahead of us, we just gotta follow his lead,” says Moore. “Uncle Archie, do your thing. I’m joining you on this journey.” So they had no plans, no charts, no ideas — just free-flowing improvisation that Moore and Davis edited afterward, dubbing in lyrics and some additional sounds while attempting to keep the core recording’s same spirit of spontaneity.

“Listening back, I don’t know that any of us would be able to re-create this,” Davis adds. “It even kind of gives me anxiety when I think of trying to do some live performances — how to translate it. I know it can be done but because it was just out of thin air, a very special moment was captured.”

The album is tied together by another, subtler throughline: education. The opening track, “Valuable Lesson,” features Moore conversationally recounting a moment he learned the power of silence; the rest of the album is spliced with tracks called “Professor Shepp’s Agenda,” on which the listener hears him teaching the band his composition “Une petite surprise pour mam’selle” and talking about the importance of public education, especially for underserved black youth. Moore himself teaches at Long Branch Elementary in Arlington, and is navigating coronavirus-era distance learning while he promotes the album.

Yet despite Shepp’s professorial status, both casually at the session and for 30 years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the saxophonist insists that he didn’t come in with any specific wisdom to impart. “Music is always a collaborative experience for me, and I learn a lot, which is important,” he says. “I felt all of the guys who played had either a very original sense of expression, or they were in fact very talented players.”

Instead of being didactic, the session served as something of a mutual admiration society, in which everyone involved found something in common through the music — leading to the album’s title. “Why can’t we bridge the distance of an ocean?” says Davis. “To bridge ancestry, our musical backgrounds, the generation gap — it’s pretty much a metaphor to explain that no matter the distance, we can always find a way to connect.”

I have been playing this nonstop since Friday.

not yet anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frWEswhM81U