Jethro Live

Stormwatch is the album that they often call the third of the Tull folk rock trilogy and after Songs From The Wood and Heavy Horses (and their subsequent five star extended version in this series) it has a hard job to do…

Rather than just give fans one live concert DVD to dig into, Jethro Tull deliver Around the World Live, a four-disc collection that spans over 30 years' worth of shows. Starting with a performance at the Isle of Wright festival in 1970 and going all the way forward to a 2005 performance in Lugano, Switzerland…

Released just as punk was taking hold on the public's imagination in America and making groups like Jethro Tull seem like dinosaurs on their way to extinction, Bursting Out became a seemingly perpetual denizen of the cutout bins for years afterward. However, it happened to be a good album, a more-than-decent capturing of a live Tull concert from Europe. The sound is remarkably good, given the group's arena rock status at the time, and the repertoire is a solid representation of the group's history, going all the way back to "A New Day Yesterday" from their second album and up through 1978's Heavy Horses, with stops along the way for "Bouree," "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath," "Cross-Eyed Mary," and a compact reprise of Thick as a Brick. Some of these tracks work better than others – the tendency here is to play loud and hard, and sometimes that just doesn't translate well on record; seeing "Locomotive Breath" probably worked better than hearing it.

Released just as punk was taking hold on the public's imagination in America and making groups like Jethro Tull seem like dinosaurs on their way to extinction, Bursting Out became a seemingly perpetual denizen of the cutout bins for years afterward. However, it happened to be a good album, a more-than-decent capturing of a live Tull concert from Europe. The sound is remarkably good, given the group's arena rock status at the time, and the repertoire is a solid representation of the group's history, going all the way back to "A New Day Yesterday" from their second album and up through 1978's Heavy Horses, with stops along the way for "Bouree," "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath," "Cross-Eyed Mary," and a compact reprise of Thick as a Brick.

A New Day Yesterday (2003), also known as Jethro Tull: A New Day Yesterday – 25th Anniversary Collection, 1969-1994, is a stereo DVD remastering of 25th Anniversary Video by Jethro Tull. The collection is named for the opening track from the band's 1969 album Stand Up…

This celebration of Jethro Tull’s tenth album follows a similar pattern to previous reissues, with the first disc containing a Steven Wilson remix followed by some ‘associated recordings’ including the previously unreleased Old Aces Die Hard and Working John, Working Joe. CDs two and three offer 22 track live tracks, recorded on the Songs From The Wood Tour across two American dates, (Boston on 6 December 1977 and Maryland on 21 November 1977). These unheard tracks have been remixed to stereo by Jakko Jakszyk and are completely unheard. There are two DVDs in this set. The first contains a 5.1 surround sound mix (DTS and Dolby 5.1) and 96/24 LPCM stereo versions of the both the original and Steven Wilson remixed version of Songs From The Wood. This DVD also features selected associated tracks, as well as various quad mixes and flat transfers. The other DVD contains video footage from that Maryland gig of 21 November 1977. The audio has been mixed to stereo and 5.1.

Each era of rock music has had its own craftily marketed phenomenon – it was the "live album" in the '70s, "unplugged" recordings in the '90s, and since the late '80s through the present day, the "tribute album." But the early 21st century saw another addition – veteran bands revisiting classic albums and performing them in their entirety. Jethro Tull's most enduring release is largely agreed to be 1971's classic Aqualung, and in late 2004 Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, and their latest Tull mates dusted off the album once more in front of a small audience for XM Radio's Then Again Live series. Since 33 years had passed between the original and the re-reading, the performances on Aqualung Live are slightly more restrained.

Jethro Tull's 11th studio album, Heavy Horses, is one of their prettier records, a veritable celebration of English folk music chock-full of gorgeous melodies, briskly played acoustic guitars and mandolins, and Ian Anderson's lilting flute backed by the group in top form. This record is a fairly close cousin to 1977's Songs from the Wood – and was ultimately the hinge-piece and first of an ecologically themed trilogy which concluded with 1979's Stormwatch – except that its songs are decidedly more passionate, delivered with a rough, robust energy that much of Tull's work since Thick as a Brick had been missing. In its lustiness it arguably surpasses even Aqualung.

A unique phenomenon in popular music history, Jethro Tull have been and still are one of the most successful live performing acts on the world stage, rivaling Led Zeppelin, Elton John and even the Rolling Stones. After forty years at the bottom, at the top and various points in between, with now some 30-odd albums to their credit and sales totaling more than 50 million, Jethro Tull are still performing typically more than a hundred concerts each year. This concert recorded in 2008 is one of their best.

Jethro Tull is one of the most successful British acts of all time with a career reaching from the late sixties to the present day. In 2003 they made their first (and so far, only) visit to the Montreux Festival…