Recorded Live

The cover of Ten Years After's 1973 album Recorded Live depicts a giant reel-to-reel recorder, which certainly captures the era when this double-LP set was recorded. Approaching the end of their run – only one more album would come, 1974's Positive Vibrations – Ten Years After were deep into the thick of '70s arena rock, so everything they played on-stage wound up stretching well beyond the five-minute mark, sometimes reaching upward of 11 minutes…

This live set is OK in small doses. Ten Years After were always rooted in the blues, and the highlights here, such as "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" and "Slow Blues in C," show they hadn't changed. While this set is competent enough, there just isn't enough of the excitement you would expect coming from this band…

Disc 1 is an incomplete Philadelphia concert, one month into the USA Pump Tour, taken from West wood One "Superstar Concert Series" broadcast May 1990. Disc 2 is the 10 songs an incomplete version of Central Park 1975 concert taken from King Biscuit Flour Hour FM Broadcast (This track order is from the January 1991 re-broadcast). It has an excellent raw sound with numbers from their new Toys in the Attic album including their new single, Walk This Way which had been released in the USA the day before.

CASIOPEA's best album "Early Alfa Years", released in April 2012, is considered an exceptional hit among the best albums by instrumental bands released recently. The reason for this is not only the excellent song selection, but also the outstanding sound quality of the original master tapes from Alpha Records, which were kept at the gates of the city until then and brought to Sony Music Studios (Nogizaka) for careful re-mastering. This collection of gems from Cassiopeia's live performances, featuring four songs each from their three classic live albums from the Alpha Records era: "Thunder Live", "Mint Jams" and "Cassiopeia Live". Of course, the original master tapes were again brought to Sony Music Studios in full collaboration with Alpha Records for a high-quality HiRes mastering.