Montreux

Filmed just a year before his untimely death from cancer, this 1992 concert from Montreux finds the great Albert Collins still at the top of his game. With his trademark Fender Telecaster and distinctive finger picking style well to the fore "The Iceman" delivers a set that runs from his early million selling single "Frosty" right up to songs from his final studio album "Iceman".

Bill Evans - At The Montreux Jazz Festival
EAC+LOG+CUE | WV: 316 MB | Artwork: 31 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Verve # 539 758-2 | Country/Year: Europe 1998, 1968
Genre: Jazz | Style: Post Bop, Modal

"Bill Evans' 1968 release, At the Montreux Jazz Festival, marks the beginning of stylistic changes for the legendary pianist… Evans, famous for a soft-spoken pianistic touch, seems driven to new vistas on this album. He experiments more with harmonic dissonance and striking rhythmical contrasts, making this his most extroverted playing since his freshman release, New Jazz Conceptions." ~allmusic

Hearing Albert Collins' icy guitar sound on disc is exciting, but watching the "master of the Telecaster" burn through a typically blistering set adds a whole other level of appreciation to the experience. He was a consummate showman whose crowd-roaming with a 150-foot guitar cord – before the advent of wireless gear – made him as famous for his live sets as his studio ones. This generous DVD delivers a two-for-one bargain, as it features Collins' first 40-minute show at Montreux in 1979 in addition to the hourlong titular set, the latter also available as a companion audio CD. He is on fire for both shows, although perhaps moving a bit more slowly in 1992, which preceded his untimely death by just a year. As was his norm, Collins stretched songs to their breaking point on-stage, and three of the seven tunes he performed in 1992 break the ten-minute mark. But his playing was so inventive and his stage presence so rousing that nothing seems overly extended or drawn out…….

Putting competitive trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, and Clark Terry and an Oscar Peterson Trio with bassist Niels Pedersen and drummer Louis Bellson together before a live crowd at the Montreux Jazz Festival was a typically inspired idea by producer Norman Granz. The trumpeters bring out the best in each other on "There Is No Greater Love," "On the Alamo" and "Indiana," although Peterson does not let himself get upstaged during this exuberant jam session.