Search - James Brown :: Live at the Apollo 2 (Dlx) (Dig)

Perhaps the best live album ever made

Gregory S Sones | Houston, Texas USA | 02/10/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I first ran across this album years ago on vinyl and it quickly became one of my favorites. This is James Brown at the height of his powers before he began to recycle his best efforts and shriek too much. This version of the band is tighter than a drum head and pumps out the funk beyond belief.I totally flipped when I found the CD with EVEN MORE MATERIAL! While I'm not completely crazy about the intermission material (Caravan is a good song but without SEEING the JB Dancers doing their stuff it seems like filler) the "There Was a Time" medley is worth the price of admission alone. This song is so powerful it completely makes up for some slight (and I mean slight) problems with the rest of the set. Every time I have it on in the car I can't help but shout along with the audience, UHHHH....UHHHH UHHHH!!!! If you're one of the drivers next to me in Houston please be kind and don't laugh too loud - I just can't help myself. "Kansas City" is also one of the highlights of the show while "Cold Sweat" is an absolute monster. Well, you get the picture. I just wish I could have been there at the Apollo in June of 1967 to witness this amazing series of concerts. If only I had a time machine I could have shot over to the Monterey Pop festival to catch Jimi and Otis and then later that same month out east to the Apollo.... Please strongly consider this CD for you collection. If you have the slightest funk-bone in your body, you won't be disappointed. Long live James Brown!"

Vital

Fred McGhee | Austin, TX | 04/11/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Recent musicological and historical analyses of James Brown have come to realize that he is probably one of the five most important musicians of the second half of the twentieth century, easily as important as Dylan and the Beatles, and probably even Elvis and Frank Sinatra. One simply cannot understand contemporary popular music without a thorough grounding in what Brown did in his development of soul, R&B, and of course funk. One peek at the most recent Billboard chart (and not just the pop chart) should be all the proof a skeptic requires.JB recorded many fine live albums, and this is probably the best and most important. This is pivotal and high quality African-matrixed (thanks Mr. Belafonte) music, whose percussive force and unbelievably deep groove is trance inducing and hypnotic in the extreme. The experience of listening to this music is difficult to convey in words: combine an intense two hour exercise session with some hypnotherapy, intense lovemaking, poetry, and a thunderstorm, and you begin to approximate it. JB and the Fabulous Flames are so rock-solid here, they are about as dense as the thickest diamond. This music is tighter than Captain America's shield.Regarding the sound quality; it's not the best. Perhaps this is a reflection of the middling tape quality of the original, because one can actually hear tape squeak at various places in the performance. It's not a deal breaker, though, and I'm glad the engineers decided to keep the imperfections in place instead of editing them out."

A Funk Is Born

Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 01/15/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"James Brown has made four albums at Harlem's Apollo, the first in 1963 introducing the James Brown Show to a whole new audience and staying in the top selling lists for well over a year. By the time of this second album, selected mainly from the second of two shows recorded during a record-breaking 10-day run in June 1967, he had played there a further 200 times and claimed to know the stage so well he would recognize it blindfold from the sound of the fans in the balcony.

The concerts caught the James Brown Band at an important transitional phase. The previous month Pee Wee Ellis had taken as over musical director and with Maceo Parker recently restored to the line-up on tenor sax the music had taken a new, more funky direction (at a time when funk didn't exist), as demonstrated on the first groundbreaking piece they had recorded together that same month, Cold Sweat. James Brown did not waste the opportunity to bring his audience up to date with his sound, performing new titles such as Cold Sweat and Let Yourself Go, the current single.

However, less than two minutes into the latter song the Band go into an extended locked groove jam called There Was A Time, with both Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks whacking out the tempo on twin drum kits, plus bongos by Ronald Selicoe, and this soon developed a life of its own when an edit of the performance appeared as the B-side of the next single, I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me). It did better in the R&B charts than the A-side, reaching number 3, and boosted sales of this legendary live album. The liner notes claim that this track "may well be the single most riveting Brown performance on record."

However, James Brown was off to Las Vegas the following month and also had an eye for the mainstream, so as well there are violin-filled renditions of standards like That's Life and I Wanna Be Around, which owes as much to Tony Bennett as it does to Dinah Washington.

This two CD set reconstructs the original set-list as far as is possible, restoring material edited from the original 1968 double-album because of running-time constraints, including in their entirety Sweet Soul Music from Bobby Byrd's set and the James Brown Band's revival of Duke Ellington's Caravan, and edits removed from longer pieces such as It's A Man's Man's Man's World, There Was A Time, I Feel All Right and Cold Sweat, with its Maceo Parker sax solos, all taken from the four-track remote recording master tape"