Renaissance Unplugged

The Allman Brothers Band featured on the penultimate episode in the very first season of MTV Unplugged, and were precisely the kind of act that producers Robert Small, Jim Burns and Jules Shear had in mind when creating the show. Taking place on the 19th of November 1990, the performance on Unplugged came just over a year into the Allmans reunion, the group having parted company in the early 80s. Reformed around guitarist Warren Haynes, from Dickey Betts solo outfit, and bassist Allen Woody, the band was enjoying something of a renaissance, brought on by both a late 80s nostalgia for the classic rock acts of the 60s and 70s as well as the chart success of their career-retrospective box-set, Dreams. In the summer of1990, the Allmans released their ninth studio album, and first for nearly a decade, Seven Turns; it confirmed that the Allman Brothers Band was back. And so the MTV performance arrived while the Allman s were riding high as a rehabilitated band touring a successful album.

This set documents Return to Forever's unplugged tour of 2009. Its tracks consist mainly of rearranged RTF tunes and jazz standards for piano trio, though there are wonderful surprises…