From the opening double guitar lines of the Blind Faith classic Had To Cry Today, Steve Winwood’s and Eric Clapton’s performance on their recently released CD/DVD Live From Madison Square Garden is electrifying.
Not electrifying in a showy, glitzy, glamorous sense, but in a musical sense. The two giants whose careers started in the 1960s and have paralleled each other, intersecting once for an extended period in 1969, show they are still fully capable of producing inspring and creative performances on their own material and covers of some of their contemporaries.
It seems fitting that the duo begins their MSG show, which was recorded in February, 2008 over three nights, with the opening track from their only album together, Blind Faith.
It also shows off Winwood as an extraordinary and somewhat overlooked guitarist, who is Clapton’s perfect foil, particularly when they solo simultaneously at the end of the tune.
The track, always overshadowed by two others on that 1969 album, Cant’ Find My Way Home and Presence Of The Lord, also gets its due, as a riff-driven vehicle but with some very unconventional chord changes for a guitar-slinging number. Continue reading Winwood, Clapton after all these years
The Amherst, Mass., based trio mixes elements of blues and jazz into its melodic and involved riffs, unusual rhythms and a decided accent on the instrumental and improvisational side to its songs. In fact, sometimes it seems the songs exist simply to push the musical side of the compositions further along.
A British musician who also belonged in this group stood apart somewhat because his music was singular, based in folk but incorporating elements of rock, pop and ethnic music from Celtic to Greek. That was Cat Stevens.
Jeff Beck 
His latest, the strong-selling Together Through Life, a further exploration of roots-rock calling on all his musical influences while in collaboration with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, succeeds in most aspects despite a few tracks that fall short of the high level of most of this album.
It’s a pleasure to note that the film makers of Jeff Beck Performing This Week … Live At Ronnie Scott’s got it right. So right it’s one of the best concert films in recent memory. The last with this type of professionalism and dedication to the music and musicians was another Cream gig, the reunion concert from 2005, also at RAH. But the Beck show is better.
His influence may very well reach the furthest of the three Kings with Eric Clapton and Peter Green among his disciples. And I played with him in a one-off concert in New York in the early ’70s. But more on that later.
She has been very productive since, and although she doesn’t hit the mark with every release, Faithfull has managed to make more than a handful of quality albums. Her latest, Easy Come Easy Go, a covers record produced by Hall Willner, with whom she has done some of her best work, is one such entry.
I’m a big fan of Amazon. I should be, I’ve spent quite a bit of money there, mostly on CDs, vinyl, electronics and computer gear in the past five or six years. I’m an even bigger fan of their Marketplace, where you can buy almost anything for less than what Amazon sells an item for from, in my experience, reputable sellers.