JANE AT HOME LIVE

Double album of the same great German prog from one of the most influential founders of Germany's progressive 70's rock scene. Like many of the Brain label recordings this carries a heavy underground Kraut rock aspect to it with heavy drooling organ wisps, driving electric guitar and great bass/drum interplay. This album also carries a great live feel to it with nice open concert hall sound throughout. JANE's music is always moving... melting aspects of classic and space rock into some wonderful sound definitions. I have always loved the jam portions on this live album... meaty little album... oh yes also was recorded by Conrad Plank!.

I've always been a fan from German keyboardplayer Manfred Wieczorcke. He played in the early line-up from ELOY and then moved to JANE. There he delivered his best work on the live 2-LP "Jane Live At Home". In the Seventies JANE made a progressive blend of rock and blues featuring emotional vocals (with an obvious German accent), good harder-edged guitarplay and compelling keyboardwork (floods of organ along strings and MiniMoog). The compositions sound simple but very tasteful, this band knows how to carry you away with their music: the one moment it's rock and roll with fiery electric guitar, the other moment you hear soaring keyboards, great build ups and sumptuous outbursts. You cannot compare JANE to the progrock legends ELP, GENESIS, YES or KING CRIMSON but in my opinion this 2-LP is one of the best progressive records from all those melodic and tasteful German progressive bands that emerged in the Seventies.

"Live at Home" is an excellent album of JANE and it arguably surpasses the quality of their earlier studio works. This album was a special treat for my adolescent years when we used to play and play the menacing "Windows" over and over again. There are several nice hard rock, melodic ballads, but the real peak of the album are lengthier space- jams "Windows" (with minor hommage to THE BEATLES' "Eleanor Rigby" chorus melody), "Hangman", "Hightime for Crusaders", "Fire, Water, Earth and Air" with strong psychedelic moments stressed by fiery guitar solos, heavy organ and synth arrangements and repetitive "kraut-style" rhythm section. Highly recommended as a sort of "best of JANE live".

A VERY GOOD OLD FRIEND OF MINE!

There are albums i do like, others i love and a very few I am in love with (not the same meaning!)There are albums which have been part of my life now for decades, albums i cherish beyond their musical achievments. They don't have to be perfect as there is no such thing as perfect in music as it's more of a matter of taste. But when you visit these personal treasures, or better come to visit your sound system, this is like an old good friend you can count on coming to your house to say hello. And this is like opening a door to happiness, to joy with deep feelings running inside you.

JANE 'LIVE AT HOME'' is one of those albums! I bought the double LP back then in 1977, still playing it with the new CD as well, always loving it to death and still feeling those goosebumps everytime i am playing it! This is like a long lasting faithfull friendship between this album and I never to be broken.

JANE is a German band which started in Hannover in 1972 with a wonderful space-rock LP named TOGETHER full of wonderful symphonic keyboards and featuring one of the most tasteful guitarist i know KLAUS HESS capable of playing the most melodic lines you will ever hear in the Gilmour style or blistering energetic riffs a la David Brock from Hawkwind. Add some great vocal melodies BJH would have been proud of,mix with some early Pink Floyd space tapestry and Eloy symphonism, pour some Wishbone Ash guitar Argus style and you have JANE: a wonderful German Progressive band that deserves more than 10 reviews.

If you have read my reviews about this band, you know not everything has been perfect with them, even once forgetting their prog roots to release a ..blues/hard rock album (JANE III) and the average more mainstream LADY. They came back progging with FIRE WATER & EARTH, a competent 3 star concept album sure to please any space-rock fan, but not a complete masterpiece. JANE ''LIVE AT HOME'' was their first album i bought from them and it's still my favorite. This is where JANE got it all together!

All the best songs from the past are present like the masterful DAYTIME and HANGMAN from their first album. HANGMAN is one of those typical JANE songs i adore with slow spacey start with wonderful organ, a nice melody BJH style before the song accelerates in a frenetic guitar bravado every hard rock gutarist would have liked to perform on their own. This is one of my 10 all times favorite guitar solos. I think KLAUS HESS is a monument to prog guitar. This is not only about virtuosity or playing 1000 notes in a minute, this is about bringing life to you guitar, bringing the emotions from the chords he plays, giving soul to any solo HESS performs. There is not one solo (and there are plenty) that is not melodic, not tasteful even of the hardest songs, not one!

JANE ''LIVE AT HOME'' is all what we are looking in a prog record: beauty, virtuosity, creativity, a trip sure to take you away from your everyday life and its worries. Listen to HIGHTIME FOR CRUSADERS and tell me if you are not back to ATOM HEART MOTHER or MEDDLE magic and this is as good.Sure HESS has listened to a lot of Gimour, but he plays his own way which can be hard rockish as well, but always in good taste, something between BROCK and ANDY POWELL from WISHBONE ASH.

Also worth noting is that the keyboardist on this album is no less than MANFRED WIECZORKE who just left the great symphonic band ELOY to join JANE. So for Eloy or other German symph.bands fans and there are many on this site , please do not disregard this album as it would be a miss for you.

There are also a lot of unreleased tracks which only appear on this album like the 20mns epic WINDOWS, sometimes so haunting, so spacey before the guitar brings you in HAWKWIND world with scorching riffs, a hard rock mayhem embellished by mysterious synth sounds . A inter-planetary real trip it is, believe me! ANOTHER DAY is another ''hard-rocking'' tune with a wonderful riff intro and of course a fantastic solo. ALL MY FRIENDS is typical JANE with lush keyboards, nice melody and tasty energetic guitar again.

JANE never has been known for the high quality of their vocals (like a lot of German bands sadly) but they find a way to manage better live than on studio.KLAUS HESS, MARTIN HESSE the bassist and PETER PANKA the drummer are alternating behind the mike and it sounds better than when they had someone else doing bthis job like JANCKO or PULST.

The CD comes with one track less (the marvelous DAYTIME) due to time contritions. Hopefully, JANE ''LIVE AT HOME'' will be released one day as a complete 2 CD package. But you still can get the present edition as it won't disapoint you if you are into space/symphonic melodic rock with beautiful guitar sounding. Don't believe me? try OUT IN THE RAIN and tell me if this is not heaven yet!

I also take the opportunity of this review to salute the memory of PETER PANKA the drummer who just passed away last june from cancer. He was still to the last day leading a modern version of JANE (but with no KLAUS HESS) even releasing a new album at the beginning of this year with first-hour keyboardist NADOLNY and bassist MAULCHER.

Fans of PINK FLOYD, ELOY,GROBSCHNITT, NOVALIS ,ARGUS- period WISHBONE ASH, give a chance to JANE ''LIVE AT HOME''. This is THE album!!! JANE ''LIVE AT HOME'' is like one of my best friend always present when i need it sure to make me feel great everytime we are together, a friendship that will last to my old days!

5 STARS.

This is a very good live album from this German band. Most of their records actually range from good to very good (except one : "Jane III").

This original double vinyl is cut by one song unfortunately. The excellent "Daytime". One of my fave from their whole repertoire. It is really a shame and a non-sense that they dropped this song. They should have cut some shorter pieces to allow its release on the CD format.

Their space-rock tinted with hard flavours is quite attractive. On par with the best of "Eloy" except that vocals are more bearable on "Jane" 's efforts. The major attraction being the excellent guitar play of Klaus Hess. At times, the keys also sound as Hensley's ones : pumping jolly good and rocking alright like during "Hangman" which is one of the many highlights from this live set.

It is the first album to feature Manfred Wieczorke (ex-"Eloy" on the keyboards). On "Eloy" 's web-site, it is said that his move was mainly due to a better financial outlook with "Jane". Because at the time of this release, sales figures are really good for this German band. In a few week's time, this live album sold over 100,000 copies!

This album lasts for almost eighty minutes of the best of "Jane" 's music. I can only recommend this album if you are willing to discover their repertoire and build up around it according your preferences. Mine still go to their debut album : "Together".

I do regret that their epic "Fire, Water, Earth & Air" has been reduced to a mere four minutes track but this feeling will be compensated by the great "Windows". An unreleased and wonderful song. Fully Floydian sounds (guitar and keys). Symphonic, spacey and emotional (you know how much I praise this characteristic). A highlight of course.

This is my eleven hundredth review on PA. I dedicate this one to my friend Febus.

Four stars for this strong live album.

I had listened to a couple of Jane records back in the 70's and decided that I didn't like Jane. For some time now I felt a nervous itch every time I came close to Jane records in a shop wondering if my teenage judgement might still be valuable. So the other day, in order to have my peace of mind, I bought 'Jane live' and after a couple of tracks I knew why I didn't liked Jane back then, but I also found a new angle to their music. Jane represents the heavier side of Geman Rock with a typical blues free heavy rock and is a kind of one trick pony band. They play simple songs, altering between ballads and medium tempo tracks without much surprise. What I found once boring, the predictable side of their music, pleases me now in a Less is More sens. Instead of playing a thousand notes a second, or endless solos, Jane sticks to their craftmansship and they do it well. All songs are nicely crafted with good instrumental parts and a great guitar and organ sound. For a German band the English vocals are accepatble. BTW a funny side note : the all German band Jane recording in their hometown Hannover speaks to the audience in ... English! ... a typical feature for most of the Geman rock bands in the 70's when it was still rare to have bands singing in German and the identification with anglo-saxon rock was strong. Novalis and Kraftwerk, on opposite sides of the musical spectrum were still the exception. There are no real highligbhts on the record, but I quite like the obligatory side-long track Windows with his slow pace. I kind of regret not having seen them in concert! Are You ready To Rock? Yeeeeess!

Jane at their apogee brings into focus all their subtle qualities that had by this time made them the most groovin' German band which didn't really fit into the Krautrock category with their rather simple but effective brand of heavy blues/rock on this spaced out August 1976 live performance at the Niedersachsenhalle in their hometown of Hanover, Germany. Loathe it or love it it's all here , stoned out vocals, lofty guitar freakouts, pulsating Hammond organ and the cumbersome beat which made the Jane sound so distinct. Next to Grobschnitt's Solar Music Live this is the penultimate German live rock album hands down and the only Jane album to achieve gold status. Searing versions of Daytime and Hangman off their first LP Together as well as the ballad Out In The Rain from the Here We Are LP burn with even more passion than the originals along with excerpts from Fire, Water, Earth & Air plus an extended 20 minute epic entitled Windows which was not released on any of their studio albums is included here exclusively for the home crowd. Not a directionless jam but actually one of their strongest compositions with impressive use of synths!

Much to the chagrin of long time Jane fans Daytime was left out of earlier single CD re-ssues but is included in a January 2009 double CD re-issue along with several bonus tracks taken from a contemporary WDR Radio broadcast. All of Jane's cool friends can now come together in the sun once again! Not only one of the best live German albums but one of the best live rock albums to emerge from the seventies period. Indespensable. A headphone album if there ever was one.

Since 1976, when this album was released for the first time, i always had a copy of it as it is one of my alltime fav's. During the years i changed from tape to LP, from LP to CD and actually i changed to the rerelease as a remastered DoubleCD. So, as you'ld see, it's a must have in German early prog!

The new release not only contains the full concert with Daytime and an extended version of Windows, it also contains some alternate live versions, taken from the WDR-sessions in 1977. The sound on the of the 76 recordings is much better than on the old CD, the 77 recordings can't beat them, although some of the alternate versions are even more interesting.

Jane never hit that level of quality again, neither on studio nor on live recordings, so Live At Home in some cases is a little bit of history, a German band at its top!

What to say about the music, without repeating the other reviews? I think, in those years in the mid and ending 70's Jane (among with Omega) was not only for me the start into prog, the concert in Hannover was my first big concert as well.

Alongside the same years expansive concept album 'Fire, Water, Earth & Air' and considered by fans as the high watermark of Jane's lengthy career, 1976's double-sided concert album 'Live At Home' finds the Teutonic icons triumphantly blasting out a ballsy set filled with the group's trademark psych-tinged prog medleys, spaced-out angular rockers and Pink Floyd-ish soundscapes. To all extents and purposes a greatest hits set rounding up the best of their first five studio efforts, 'Live At Home' basically puts a sense of closure over Jane's prolific - and best - period, their early days. Any post 1976 albums should be treated with caution by those just starting to explore Jane's discography, though the opposite is also true; anything released before this definitive live album is well worth checking out. Featuring a near-classic line-up of Klaus Hess(guitar, vocals), Martin Hesse(bass, vocals), Peter Panka(drums, vocals) and former Eloy member Manfred Wieczorke(keyboards), 'Live At Home' shows just how Powerful Jane could be in the live arena, something that shouldn't come as a real surprise considering that through the latter half of the 1970s they were one of the top live draws in Germany, selling millions of records in the process. As well as rattling through most of 'Fire, Water, Earth & Air', there is also an iconic - and lengthy - version of the groups mystical opus 'Windows', some scintillating guitar work adorning the blues-tinged 'Lady' and a truly mesmerising delivery of the twelve-minute rock odyssey 'Hangman'. Maybe at times Jane's influences become a bit too obvious, though despite their obvious debt to, amongst(many) others, the likes of Pink Floyd(whom many an over-zealous fan has compared them to) the group's bluesy brand of spacey rock 'n' roll seems almost perfectly suited to the live setting. A fluid, slickly- delivered album, 'Live At Home' is the sound of a group hit peak form.

STEFAN TURNER, STOKE NEWINGTON, 2012

This surely must be worth 5 stars. Its a very bold idea to mix classic tracks with unreleased material in a live album. This wonderful collection consists of familiar material from the first 5 albums plus previously unreleased tracks . The ratio is 50/50 of classic tracks to new tracks but everything blends together remarkably well. It's probably because the tempos , keys , melodic ranges of the lead lines and the feel of the tracks is very similar. Its true symphonic prog. A masterpiece which was a huge seller in Germany and even broke the band in America (well a little bit anyway)

The cover picture of the surface of Mars was also a bold move for an album released in 1977. Everything is perfect. This album should be hailed alongside Made In Japan, Strangers In the Night and Uriah Heep Live as one of the all time double live albums.

The unreleased material consists of 'All My Friends', Expectation', 'Another Way' ,'River', 'High Time For Crusaders' and 'Windows' This is a real masterpiece. If you only try one Jane album this will have you hooked. Then you can move on to the first album, possibly skipping Jane III and go as far as 'Masque'. 'Masque' is where I leave the Jane fold , but I'm always prepared to be lured back in!

Oh, the 70's! The decade of the double live album! So many masterpieces came from that time: Deep Purple with Made In Japan, Uriah Heep with Live, Wishbone Ash with Live Dates, UFO with Strangers In The Night, to name but a few. Even live triple albums were game in that category (Yessongs and Welcome Back My Friends..., were the prime ones). Well, it seemed a sure shot for everyone. And even some, say, "second league" bands did release some at least very good ones. So when I found out that Germany prog rocker Jane did theirs, I smelled something good. And, thankfully I was right. Jane never really got much of my attention at the time, for there were so many better and more creative groups releasing far superior albums at the time, even in that country (Triumvirat, Ammon Dull II, Eloy and others). But nowadays I tend to appreciate their work more. And as a live band they do sound better than in the studio, at least for me.

At Home Live was recorded at their hometown, Hannover, and so, the audience was truly a fanatical one. Everything work on this album: the cover the repertoire, the performances, the production, even (excellent picture of Mars landscape). I was drawn to this record mainly because it featured ex Eloy Manfred Wieczorke on keyboards, so I knew it would have lots of heavy Hammond runs, and sure enough they are there. Jane never really got too sophisticated or complex as its contemporaries, and it shows on the longer tracks, where it is clear they are not capable of long solos or jams and are relying a lot on Wieczorke's talent to hold things up. Although it does not always work, most of the time it does. And, what the hell, it is a kind of "best of" compilation, I guess the songs featured here are indeed their best so far. I'm not so fond of the last track, the unreleased Windows. With its 20 minute long running time it shows that it was a good idea not to commit that one of their studio album. Typical at the time it has its moments but could have been cut to one third of its length for a better result. But I guess they had to prove they could deliver their "epic". It was kind of obligatory in the 70's to do such thing, I guess, even if you could not really handle such undertaking.

All in all a real good live album, Not really a masterpiece, but a solid work with probably the best songs and performances of those guys. And I love those vintage keyboards sounds!

Rating: 3,5 stars, that I will round to four because of those great keys!