Cohen of Protection

One by one, the guests arrive

The guests are coming through

The open-hearted many

The broken-hearted few

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

And those who dance, begin to dance

Those who weep begin

And "Welcome, welcome!" cries a voice,

"Let all my guests come in."

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

And all go stumbling through that house

in lonely secrecy

Saying "Do reveal yourself."

or "Why has thou forsaken me?"

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

All at once the torches flare

The inner door flies open

One by one they enter there

In every style of passion

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

And here they take their sweet repast

While house and grounds dissolve

And one by one the guests are cast

Beyond the garden wall

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

Those who dance, begin to dance

Those who weep begin

Those who earnestly are lost

Are lost and lost again

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

One by one, the guests arrive

The guests are coming through

The broken-hearted many

The open-hearted few

And no one knows where the night is going

And no one knows why the wine is flowing

Oh love, I need you

I need you

I need you

I need you

Oh... I need you now

Leonard Cohen

Concertgebouw

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

10.30.1980

01 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye 

02 Who By Fire 

03 The Window   

04 Passing Through

           05 The Guests           

06 There Is a War

07 Suzanne

08 The Stranger Song

09 LC speaks

10 Chelsea Hotel #2

11 The Partisan

12 The Story of Isaac

13 The Gypsy's Wife

14 poem: The Music Crept By Us/improv: Concertgebouw

15 Diamonds In the Mine

16 Famous Blue Raincoat

17 Lover, Lover, Lover

18 LC speaks

19 Memories

20 So Long, Marianne

21 applause/LC speaks

22 One of Us Cannot Be Wrong

23 Joan of Arc

24 I Tried to Leave You

25 applause/LC speaks

26 Do I Have to Dance All Night?

Total time: 2:06:00

disc break goes after Track 13

Leonard Cohen - guitar, recorder & vocals

Roscoe Beck - bass

John Bilezikjian - oud & mandolin

Bill Ginn - keyboards & accordion

Raffi Hakopian - violin

Steve Meador - drums

Paul Ostermayer - reeds & winds

Mitch Watkins - guitar

Sharon Robinson - vocals

Jennifer Warnes - vocals

declicked master cassettes of the original VPRO-FM pre-broadcast reels
794 MB FLAC/October 2020 archive link

No one alerted me this killer show was 40 today!!! Possibly the best recorded and most essential Leonard Cohen ROIO, liberated and declicked from the original Dutch Radio reels, and now here for your Halloween weekend jams! You're welcome!! Boo!!!--J.

9.21.1934 - 11.7.2016

Convenience Story

Happy Sunday and welcome to the 7th anniversary of this page! Today we have a big birthday -- well, another big birthday besides my own! -- that we'll use to celebrate two people who have known each other since childhood and were born just a few weeks apart in the same town.

For once upon a time, 45 years ago, in a small city in Norway, two eventual classmates would come into the world.

They met, if I have the story straight, as competing projects in a grade school Science Fair.

At age 16, while still at school together, they formed their first band, which was a fairly standard electric rock outfit.

The band broke up when they graduated, but the two stuck to music as a standalone acoustic duo, naming themselves Kings Of Convenience for the easily transported, portable nature of what they were doing.

If I had to describe their music, I would say they are what Brazilian bossa deity João Gilberto might sound like, had he been born in the frozen, wintry half-light of Bergen, Norway.

One of them -- he is on the left in the picture above -- is called Eirik Glambek Bøe, and he is 45 today. The other, Erlend Øye, will be the same on November 21st.

Perhaps even stranger than Norwegians who sound like a Brazilian Simon & Garfunkel is the way I found these cats.

It all happened because my friend worked in the Metreon in San Francisco and they had some sort of Christmas party there, at the end of 2001.

There was, apparently, a little Secret Santa moment, where my friend reached into a sack full of gifts and was fortunate enough to pull out one of these guys' CDs. At the time, they only had two out, and one was of DJ remixes of their stuff.

We spent the first part of 2002 obsessed with them, and later on we even got to see them play when they came to the Bay Area.

We'll celebrate this duo with a half hour of footage from the beloved German program Rockpalast, plus a little secret Easter Egg below that after the fold, for the intrepid readers who stick with my drivel through to its merciful conclusion.

Kings of Convenience

"Rockpalast"

ZAKK

Düsseldorf, Germany

11.29.2004

01 Love Is No Big Truth

02 I Don't Know What I Can Save You From

03 Sorry Or Please

04 Stay Out of Trouble

05 Know-How

06 Misread

07 I'd Rather Dance with You

Total time: 29:11

Eirik Glambek Bøe: guitar & vocals

Erlend Øye: guitar, keyboards & vocals

PAL DVD of a digital capture of the original Festival satellite broadcast of an episode of "Rockpalast";

originally aired 11.30.2004

1.64 GB PAL/October 2020 archive link

As a treat -- I believe in giving the best gifts to others for my birthday -- I have placed cloudward, alongside the main share, a compilation of Kings Of Convenience that I keep in my phone, which contains all or most of their best B-sides and rare tracks as well as a few of my choicest LP selections from them.

I hope you can get next to these guys -- their music is extremely special to me and is never far from my mind or my ears -- as we celebrate their Scorpio advent upon the world 45 years ago! And of course I thank everyone reading this for these seven years of Blissness, and promise to try and keep this page flowing for as long as there is unissued music to share.--J.

Warsaw Delight II: Cherry On Top

OK, I lied. I said today's thing would be different from yesterday's. It isn't. Much.

Heck, it isn't even in a different venue. Or decade. I'm such a liar.

What can I do? The thing I planned for today is gonna take more work and will be posted in December.

Plus, this bad boy is 40 today. And I just don't post nearly enough Polish Jazz. Or videos. Or videos of Polish Jazz.

This one's a burner too.  Janusz Muniak is maniac enough, he's one of the mainstays of this music, even gone four years. But you place the Don Cherry -- who coincidentally also passed 25 years ago last week -- atop it and you get a tasty burner indeed.

The untitled pieces in this might be improvised, I'm not exactly sure. But no matter, music is music and you can Call It Anything, as Miles once said.

So let's hit it, shall we? This is perfect Saturday afternoon fare if you ask me.

Janusz Muniak Quartet + Don Cherry

23th Jazz Jamboree '80

Sala Kongresowa

Warsaw, Poland

10.24.1980

01 unidentified title

02 Body and Soul

03 Malinye

04 unidentified title

05 Full Moon

06 Guinea/Mopti

07 Race Face

08 unidentified title

09 Malinye (reprise)

Total time = 1:03:58

Janusz Muniak - tenor & soprano saxophones

Pierre Pausgen - piano

Andrzej Cudzich - bass

Jerzy Bezucha - drums

Don Cherry - pocket trumpet, melodica, percussion & vocals

mpg file made from a PAL DVD of a digital capture of a 2009 TV Kultura satellite rebroadcast

1.28 GB MPG/October 2020 archive link

I'll be right back tomorrow with the finale of this fearsome foursome, conveniently of course. But don't hesitate to clock this 64 minutes of unclassifiable fun, coming to you courtesy of two absolute pillar performers and their cohorts.--J.

                                                                 11.18.1936 - 10.19.1995        6.3.1941 - 1.31.2016

Groovin' Is ECM: Warsaw Delight

Damn, is he fine or what? Jan Garbarek is making the blood shift in my body when I'm supposed to be innocently blogging one of his very most incredible live performances.

Our latest episode of Music That Time Forgot involves this Norwegian saxophonist -- OK, he's technically Polish but his family fled the occupation during WWII when he was really small -- hypnotizing yet another audience about 37 or so years ago in Warsaw.

This bad boy -- worked over by the experts to make it sonically almost indistinguishable from a standard, immaculately-recorded Manfred Eicher ECM platter -- features one of our hero's greatest bands on an 80-minute voyage to stormy serenity.

I dunno if this band was ever recorded in the studio -- the Wayfarer record this tour is meant to support has Bill Frisell on it instead of David Torn -- but we thank the ROIO gods that someone (the soundman at the desk?) captured it in this sort of quality.

Speaking of David Torn, he tears this show up like a bundle of confetti at a ticker tape parade and cascades it -- in the form of highly processed notes on the guitar -- over the audience until they are marching down the Fifth Avenue of their minds in perfect step.

That said, it's time to cut the chatter and, once again, spin the platter.

Jan Garbarek Quartet

Jazz Jamboree

Sala Kongresova 

Warsaw, Poland

10.23.1983

01 Skygger

02 Kite Dance

03 The Last Stage of a Long Journey

04 Footprints

05 Red Roof

06 Witchi-Tai-To 

07 Entering

Total time: 1:18:41

Jan Garbarek - tenor & soprano saxophones, flute

Eberhard Weber - bass

David Torn - guitar & electronics

Michael Di Pasqua - drums 

Valleybird/Tom Phillips remaster of a soundboard capture of indeterminate origin

421 MB FLAC/October 2020 archive link

I'll be back tomorrow and Sunday with stuff that couldn't be more different than this one if it had been imported from another galaxy.

Do thrill, through, to this 78 minutes of utter mayhem, delivered by musicians as skilled and sensitive as any who were alive at the time of its making.--J.