I love a good live album; I love an album that makes me feel in the middle of things with musicians playing and an audience appreciating it. For me many bands have live albums that are better than any of their studio output. Of course "better" is very subjective here, as one could say that a live album that has mainly or only tracks released on studio albums before will always lose out on originality, but let's just forget about that aspect here. What are the live albums you love to listen to more than to any studio album of the same band?

Here are some to start with:

Kraan - Live

Grobschnitt - Solar Music Live

Hoelderlin - Live Traumstadt

Guru Guru - Live (is it a German thing??)

Transatlantic - Whirld Tour 2010

Probably more controversial, but on my list anyway, are

Yes - Yessongs

Genesis - Live

Gentle Giant - Playing the Fool

Renaissance - Live at Carnegie Hall (just about)

There are more but for now I leave it at these.

^Cool list!

It's true more than one live album of a band can better all studio albums. In case of Kraan also their second live album Tournee does that.

Mats/Morgan Band - Live

The Nice - Elegy

I haven't got much (especially not prog), but maybe these

Kollektiv - SWF Sessions Vol. 5

Phil Cohran And The Artistic Heritage Ensemble – The Spanish Suite

Music Inc. - Live at Slugs', Volume 1

Ahmad Jamal - Freeflight (but I love plenty more Jamal just as much - more live albums as well)

Yusef Lateef - Live at Pep's Volume Two (same as Jamal)

-

-

I agree with you Lewian about Gentle Giant Playing The Fool, it´s my fav record of GG  over any studio disc

That was a mistake.

Arguably one of the King Crimson live albums is in this category, but I probably don't agree. I tend to prefer studio albums due to generally better sound quality and the more perfectionist approach.

If the question was a little less absolute than "better than all", but rather "as great as any studio album, I'd include: Can - The Peel Sessions and Tangerine Dream - Ricochet, Encore... some Magma...

Btw, I've learned that most jazz artists generally not considered amongst the avant garde or cutting edge, often got some spectacular live albums that surpasses pretty much all their studio stuff. Like the already mentioned Ahmad Jamal (try also Outertimeinnerspace) and Yusef Lateef (Live at Pep's Vol. 1 are equally reccomended), Bobbi Humphrey - Live at Montreux and oh my god Herbie Mann (At The Village Gate, Returns to The Village Gate, Monday Night at the Village Gate, The Wailing Dervishes, New Mann at Newport, Live at the Whiskey a Go-Go...)

...also http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhWeWQP0sNw" rel="nofollow - Live at Montreux , http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0mcII-mE4g" rel="nofollow - The Wailing Dervishes http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0mcII-mE4g" rel="nofollow - , http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGc93pMmkU4" rel="nofollow - Live at the Whiskey a Go-Go , http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKnaCouBBUU" rel="nofollow - Recorded Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival ... are pretty much jazzrock-fusion albums by artists not normally associated with fusion & http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MWr94p_KAk" rel="nofollow - Kollektiv of course is th real prog deal 

To continue the German connection:

Frumpy - Live

And, as a band related to Frumpy (three musicians play on both albums), though not prog:

Atlantis - Live at Fabrik. Absolutely brilliant live album.

Here the first track ("Friends") of that live album:

And the final track (my personal favourite):

Interesting thread. Contrary to Nick, I generally prefer studio albums, but there are some exceptions... And, sometimes live albums are also a kind of "best of" compilations.

- Agree on Hoelderlin and on Grobschnitt's Solar Music Live (although I would take Rockpommels's Land with it to a desert island...).

- Yessongs is indeed a wonderful rendition of Yes at that time, but they did some other splendid, and very different, studio albums after that, so I'm less sure about elevating it "above" all of their studio efforts.

- Incontestably, to me: Deep Purple - Live in Japan. Also because I find most of their studio albums (apart from maybe their first ones) rather inconsistent (this might be the same regarding Uriah Heep, but I must admit that - I think - I never listened to one of their live albums).

- Barclay James Harvest - Live; and also Berlin, A Concert for the People.

- Omega - Live at the Kisstadion '79

...

 

 

Hi,

Heck, the AD2 album "Live in London" is exceptional, and the only live album of theirs that is outstanding, in that the band is really on it, as opposed to some of the later stuff that is not cohesive at all, and likely lacked some more rehearsal ... but even in that Italian live video they were very good, were it not for some horrible sound moments with Chris Karrer not having his instrument plugged, and him having to search for it to start working so he could play it. A very sad moment, and it reminds me of OZRIC TENTACLES here in Portland, when they were coming through and I made sure a month earlier warn them in their website about Portland not knowing how to do keyboards (they can only do straight rock music!!!!!! and it is the reason for so much crap in the bars!) ... and sure enough ... Silas' keyboards were in and out all the time, and missing half the time. 10 years earlier Seaweed had the same issue with it at La Luna!

In general, in the early days, the OZRICS were better LIVE than on the record, considering that almost all of their 3 or 4 first albums, all came from the live material. But after John left, the band was still nice, but I don't think they were as well stretched out as they had been before ... and since then, it is just another rock band out there, with a nice guitarist ... who obviously can not do anything else other than his own ideas. Not bad, mind you, but the "liveliness" that it had before has not been there for 20 years!

One other special ... person. STEVIE RAY VAUGHN was great on stage, and for my tastes blew out any studio album. It is far out and impressive to see him do it on the stage ... and he deserves the touch and accolades that he gained in his lifetime. I was lucky enough to see him with Robert Cray, and on that night, Robert was just another rhythm guitar, because Stevie was on fire!

I was thinking NEKTAR. Their album "Sounds Like This" is EXACTLY what you got on stage. And when we saw them (Remember the Future first tour), they were note clean on all the material all the way through. It was uncanny, and it really made the albums come alive in your heart. You knew the band was true to its music live or not.

Possibly the kings of the LIVE stuff, would have to be THE GRATEFUL DEAD. No band EVER has had more fans trading shows and enjoying the material, even though it was bit here bit there different all the time ... it wasn't a problem for their fans ... of course this is something that PA fans can never appreciate (as much as it was then!!!!) anyway, since they like their stars to sound like the albums complete with auto tune and everything else.

Yes, good call!

how about a band that never made a studio album, only a live album?

this is top Canterbury royalty, so no wonder this is an excellent live album

^The last one goes somewhat against the idea of the thread, however I'm grateful because I didn't know about that album and am very keen to hear it, loving Didier Malherbe's work in particular but also the rest make a great lineup.

This one is just to agree with some of those posted, so Space Ritual, Live in Japan, Stop Making Sense, Barclay James Harvest Live are on my own list for sure. I had thought about Amon Düül II Live in London before posting this thread. They are indeed in great form there and the rendition of the tracks from Yeti and Tanz der Lemminge is wonderful, however I feel let down a bit by the Improvisation (only original track there), not because it's bad but rather it was cut short before taking off, which I think wasn't a good decision. It doesn't really come to life like this, and it's a wasted opportunity to showcase their free flying spontaneous side live.

You're certainly fond of live albums, Grumpy. Concerning Kraan, my fave album is their debut. 

I guess the first one that comes to mind is...

Followed by...

And maybe...

Grumpyprogfan wrote:

He was even better live in person, especially around '83/'84.   One of the great blues performers ever, up there with Jimi himself.   And his Double Trouble were off the charts.

great one, thanks for mentioning it. 

Back in the day it was a real treat to get a well recorded live album that gave you all that feeling and ambiance of the live setting, remember these live shows were recorded LIVE on tape and only select cities. Compared to today where essentially you can record all shows to a hard drive and then sit back and pick out the "best" shows to release and edit the living daylights out of them, back in the day they were works of art from an engineering view.

UFO~Strangers In the Night (such a tight performance)

Rush~AtWAS (the rawness added such life to the show)

AC/DC~If You Want Blood....

Scorpions~Tokyo Tapes

Iron Maiden~Life After Death (saw that tour in New Orleans....brilliant!!)

Talking Heads~Stop Making Sense

Saga~In Transit (saw that tour in Baton Rouge)

PG~Secret World Live

Genesis~Seconds Out

Earth, Wind & Fire~Gratitude (the funk power is awesome live)

Pink Floyd~Pulse

David Gilmour~Live at Pompeii (absolutely sublime recording)

Diana Krall~Live in Paris

Hi,

Of all the things I would love to hear, would be the "pre-show" warmups by Frank Zappa. Guy Guden caught him (either SB or LA, not sure which), and he got to sit through the warm up and he says it was some 30 or 40 minutes of non stop anything, all instrumental I think he said that was absolutely the best thing he ever did ... and then FZ went on stage and became someone else!

Now I want to hear what has never been shared, that one twit won't share, because he is from the rock/pop era of things and he can not relate to the rest of the music. I don't want rehashes. I want the fresh stuff that no one has heard, and even according to Stevie Vai, there is a lot more that will likely never be heard at all. And Stevie introduces what he says is the most phenomenal solo he has ever heard to end the segment, and it is indeed fantastic.

I'm not aware, of any other examples to tell you, although many of the films on The Grateful Dead, are really open to anything they do or don't do, and even catching Bob telling Jerry he missed the chord (played the wrong one!) ... which got everyone laughing, including me ... mistakes from those guys ... it was their living!

Cardiacs fall in that category for me, both "Live" and "Mare's Nest" are up with their three best studio albums (hard to differentiate between them).

Got to listen to some of your jazz nominations; I don't listen to jazz that often but in the right hour I can be very keen on it. And yeah, it's a live thing - jazz has a much higher percentage of my gig experience than of my listening at home.

And 4 Way Street by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (with Live at Massey Hall 1971 close behind) completely ruined Neil Young for me, as I can't listen to his studio versions compared to the delicacy and power of his solo acoustic renditions.

Gordy wrote: Listening to lo-fi bootlegs of Pink Floyd live performances was elemental in my development as a prog fan, and I turn to them nowadays moreso than their studio counterparts (especially shows from 1969-1973, 1975 and 1977).

I've got a show from '75--  great tour impressively reproducing WYWH.   Of course that was a more straightforward rock album than either Dark Side or the Wall so a bit simpler to recreate, but the band sounds well-rehearsed, at least on the performance I've got (can't remember what city but I think in the US somewhere).

The Allman Brother's At Fillmore East. Some bands aspire to sound that good live. But very few can. 

I wonder if it was Los Angeles from April or Boston from June.

Good call. I would add Thin Lizzy Live and Dangerous (even though I gather it's not 100% live) as it's a lot more powerful than their studio albums.

Sorry for being pedantic but half of that is live (Filmore East club, NY) and half was recorded at the BBC but with no audience. Great album though and the first time you really hear Emerson in full flight as part of The Nice. I'm sure you already know, but the album was a posthumous release to cash in on the success of ELP.

If you want to be particularly pedantically, then both halves are live, as live-in-studio releases are still generally considered live albums. There are numerous examples of live albums in PA that were recorded with no audience, it is not the presence of an audience that makes a live album a live album. Furthermore, there are probably several live albums in PA that were recorded with an audience, but which had studio overdubs before being released. There are likely many cases where a live-in-studio album could be said to be more live than a conventional live album.

Roxy Music - Viva Roxy Music

Manfred Mann's Earthband - Live In Budapest

Par Lindh Project - Live In Iceland

those were all special bands that were fantastic live. Roxy of course had the added prog clout of Wetton and Jobson in the line up circa 1975. Par Lindh had the wonderful and much missed Magda Hagberg . 

I would argue that Manfred Mann's Earthband were also a much better live band than the studio albums suggest while ELP were just off the scale live , those versions of Tarkus, KE9 and Toccata easily eclipse the studio versions imo.

I truly doubt that 

Doubt all you like. The fact that so many live-in-studio albums are included [in PA] as live albums, rather than studio albums, does tend to suggest your doubt is misplaced.

Furthermore, you need only look to the very recent past, where covid made conventional live gigs and live recordings near impossible. There were plenty of live-in-studio gigs, whose audience was only virtual. Some of these were recorded and released as live albums, and some were simply a you had to be there experience. But there are only a minority of people (you being one, I guess) who would not consider these to have been live shows, or that the recordings of them released, to be live albums.

[EDIT] I forgot to say in PA, so have added that to the sentence where I intended it to be. It was implied, but its omission made the sentence less clear.

richardh wrote: ELP - Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends , Ladies and Gentleman..

Agree.

Manfred Mann's Earthband - Live In Budapest

Seriously? I mean I have no complaints about that album, it's fine. But you prefer it over Solar Fire, Nightingales and Bombers, Watch? I'd agree that they were very good live though, but their best phase was long gone when they did Budapest, I'd say. (Of course it's all taste but we can discuss these albums here, too!)

Another nomination is Curved Air Live by the way.

the only bad thing about this album is that it is not a double album. I especially love "Everdance"; Sonja Kristina goes really wild in it, especially at the beginning of this song; she is almost barking and growling like a dog there

Great post Chris

You forgot about Nucleus, though

==========

Zep - TSRTS

Hi,

It is a tough thing, though. Think about it. 

In many of the shows the music takes a life of its own, and you follow it with your eyes closed and enjoy the trip ... and then you pick up an album, and you find ... that's not what I saw, heard or thought! So, yeah, specially a band like The Almond Brothers, or The Grateful Dead, the biggest attraction to their work, was the insane synchronicity in their stage shows, despite whatever else. Somehow the music still stood out and up, and I think this was the greatest MEMORY Fillmore days, that progressive music folks have never understood or appreciated, and now think that too much of that stuff is just a waste of time, and noodling around.

There is a massive difference between "something" and "nothing" ... but expecting FANS to decipher which is which? It's a game of fools! For fools, to boot!

In general I dislike live albums and tend to avoid them unless they're part of a band's core discography (like with GD and Zappa), or if I happen to get them as part of a boxset.

I decided the way to work out of I like a live album more than the studio albums would be to work out which album I would keep, if I could keep only one album from a band - and I absolutely would take Queen’s Live at the Rainbow over any other. Two absolutely fantastic gigs largely comprised from material from my favourite two Queen albums (the first two), and performed incredibly. The band is on fire, and many of the live renditions feel far stronger and more impressive to me, than their studio counterparts.

It never occurred to me that this is my favourite Queen release, but listening to it now, there is no question. It’s simply fantastic, with a band firing on all cylinders.

Both are really good because they're manage to sum up really well the best period in each band's career.

I was thinking about nominating that one. The selection of tracks is great and some versions are outstanding, but this was put together from several concerts, and some have in my view a sound that is less sharp and physical than it should be. I heard this before knowing the You album, and it didn't advertise that album as well as it would deserve.

the album contains two tracks from their 1973 performance at Bataclan, "You Can't Kill Me" and "Zero the Hero and the Witch's Spell" (the latter track has a different name on "Live au Bataclan"), but in shortened versions; parts of the solos were cut out. which is one of the reasons we prefer "Live au Bataclan"; the other is that "Live au Bataclan" is from one concert

On 'The Best band You Never Heard In Your Life' there are soundcheck recordings of 'Purple Haze' and 'Sunshine of your Love', both of which are brilliant!! 

All of these are great choices. CARAVAN, specially showed how well and symphonic their music was and how it was beautifully blended with an orchestra, and conducted likewise. It is said that there was a serious issue in the show, and that the orchestra refused to go onstage for an encore and the band said something about it, but in the end the orchestra did show up, and they played well. You do not seem to get this idea in the album at all, that had material moved around, compared to the remastered CD which was (supposedly) complete and in the right order. A magnificent concert, and for me, one of the very best CARAVAN albums, though people seem to be stuck on some idealistic progressive stuff from before. When heard with an orchestra, it is not progressive at all, but outstanding compositions that also fit an orchestra, which makes it "symphonic" in my book, and one of the best at it.

Space Rock (Hawkwind, Ozrics, Gong etc.)

For the German thing definetly: Jane - Live at Home

I would also prefer Santana - Lotus and Moonflower over any studio album

What's fascinating is that, based on the only official DVD (Disc 2 of "requested Document Live Vol 2"), they were actually very wooden and overly serious on stage, but you'd never know it from the audio.

I tend to always prefer studio albums to live albums and i can't think of a single prog artist that i could say i prefer the live album over all studio albums.

There are a few rock / metal albums where that's the case though.

Here's a couple a can think of at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Foghat-LIVE.jpg" rel="nofollow">

In rock music, to me, I think often it simply boils down to my aversion of being exposed to audience participation. That's rarely an issue with jazz, because audience behave differently. I most certainly have some degree of misophonia (selective sound sensitivity syndrome), and can even react negativly to hearing a barely audible smacking sound made by a vocalist opening their mouth to sing. But for some reason a nicely recorded avant-garde post-Coltrane full blowout-session isn't a problem.   

That doesn't mean a live version of a particular song can't be better for me. It's just not the rule. 

There are exceptions. For years, the only version of Katmandu by Bob Seger I heard was a live version. For whatever reason, the radio stations only played that version. It wasn't until several years later I finally heard the studio version and didn't like it nearly as much. The live version had so much more energy. Same way with the J Geils Band song, Musta Got Lost. That live version with Peter Wolf's opening monologue is the best

Funny/far out stuff.

One of the things that one can learn from the live stuff is how different somethings can be. Here is an example of 3 of their American tours.

GONG/PIP PYLE -- Very jazzy, and tight. 

GONG/PIERRE -- Massively strong with a really nice rock edge, and the long cuts were even stronger and better. Pierre obviously knew how to color those pieces, better than the others.

GONG/S2S drummer (sorry can never remember his name!) -- Trippy, and a bit on the monotonic side of things which gave a couple of pieces a neat effect, although I much preferred the rock version.

All 3 were good, although in the third version Daevid got pissed off at a camera person, that started on a detail on him, and turned the camera to something else right in the middle of it, and Daevid gave her the finger! It ought to tell you how much so many of the folks that do "film" for a lot of music know NOT ONLY bout the music, but about anything having to do with continuity within a film itself ... rock music, from the MTV crap days, was about dismantling what film had done for 70 years, and it didn't want "continuity" within its visuals ... and folks directing the film versions of almost every DVD I have, are horrible, and probably the only two groups that are done right are Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, and both folks were very concerned with their presentation and how it came out ... most rock music is crap by comparison, and insulting, to the point of thinking that a bunch of smoke is an exciting event!

Hi,

Not to mention a voice that ripped DD's ears! Even he could not believe it!

Deep Purple - Made in Japan

Rory Gallagher - Irish Tour ‘74

Thin Lizzy - Live and Dangerous

UFO - Strangers in the Night

Robin Trower - Live 

Hawkwind - Space Ritual etc. etc.

With prog I miss the more precise structure and complexity that is sometimes lost at the expense of that increased dynamism. Yessongs, Seconds Out, Welcome Back….. etc. are great to hear, but I still go back to the classic studio albums.

However, honourable exceptions in the prog field are probably:

Camel - A Live Record

BJH - Live

Gentle Giant - Live: Playing the Fool

Jethro Tull - Live Bursting Out

Renaissance - Live at Carnegie Hall

…which do a fine job to encapsulate those bands’ quality and style on one release around their peak. 

ABB - The Fillmore Concerts

Genesis - Seconds Out

Keith Jarrett - Still Live

Yes - Yessongs

Weather Report - Live In Tokyo

Tull - Bursting Out

Little Feat - Waiting For Columbus

Renaissance - Carnegie Hall

King Crimson - The Great Deceiver Set

Basie & Sinatra - Sinatra At The Sands

John Coltrane - Live At Birdland

Thin Lizzy - Live & Dangerous