Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall

£ 18

$ 24

£ 18 Sold For

Oct 23, 2020 Sold Date

Oct 13, 2020 Start Date

£ 10 Start price

5 Number Of Bids

Great Britain Country Of Seller

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Description

Happy 45th Anniversary to Bill Withers’ Live at Carnegie Hall, originally released April 21, 1973.

Friday October 6, 1972 was a particularly miserable autumn day in New York—a world away from the jazz standard written by Vernon Duke and sung, so memorably, by many a jazz legend. Not so much inviting, as wet, windy and bereft of “gleaming rooftops at sundown.” The weather itself could have been said to reflect the national mood at that time too: a nation wallowing in the mire of the Vietnam War, a nation still divided by race despite the herculean efforts of the now assassinated Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and a nation beset by a panoply of social ills.

Presented with such overwhelmingly depressive times, you could be forgiven for thinking it was impossible to find your way around the labyrinthine mess the world was in. Yet Toni Morrison, writing in the 150th Anniversary edition of The Nation in 2015, explained how artists behave as society’s resistance during these times of turbulence and impending dread. “This is precisely the time that artists go to work," Morrison reflects. "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

All of which brings us back to that fateful night in a damp and dismal New York City when Bill Withers and his band performed the roles of comforters, speakers of truths and storytellers supreme. Six people stood on the stage at Carnegie Hall and filled it with such warmth, humanity and hope that the world outside shrank and disappeared from collective view for the duration of the concert.

But how would I know? I wasn’t even born until 1975 and it was many years before I embraced Bill Withers’ bountiful back catalogue. The documenting of the concert (released on April 21, 1973) is that most elusive of musical achievements: a live album that delivers on every level. It crackles with wit, musical excellence and humility and it is a minor miracle that a recording of this stature could be achieved by an artist just eighteen months after the release of his debut album.

That miraculous achievement was, of course, aided and abetted by a band of exceptional talent. Underpinning it all was legendary drummer James Gadson and Melvin Dunlap on bass, while Bernorce Blackman’s guitar and Ray Jackson’s piano sprinkled stardust over the proceedings. Add in Withers’ plaintively soulful vocals and Bobbye Hall’s percussive flourishes and you have half a dozen reasons why the musicality on display alone would make the performance memorable.

The gig begins with the low-key funk of “Use Me” and it matures in concert to a much nastier, dirtier gritty funk than on record. It also offers the first example of the magnetic interplay between the band and the thrilled audience. As it comes to a standstill, the reception is so rapturous that Withers asks the audience “One more time?” and it transmogrifies into an eight minute staccato funk workout that gets an even bigger response at its conclusion.