Search - Stan Kenton & His Orchestra :: Live at Carthage College 1

Not the greatest, but I'll take it.

Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 03/03/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I can't disagree with those [people] who single out the uneven quality of the audio of this bootlegged live recording (the mic is obviously favoring the piano and saxes) as well as the subpar musicianship of this particular edition of the Kenton bands (face it, in the 40s and 50s Kenton had his pick of all the top L.A. studio players and West Coast hall of famers). But I was present at this 1974 concert and had no idea it had been recorded let alone issued as a commercial release. To have discovered this album, totally by chance and 28 years after the event, is tantamount to striking gold. With the exception of the applause following a couple of memorably bad trumpet solos (perhaps it's just as well they weren't miked more effectively), those are my hands clapping on the record!Even apart from personal experience, this album documents a curious period in big band history as well as the annals of the Kenton ensembles. Only 4 bands survived the band-band era of the 1940s--Duke, Basie, Woody Herman and Stan Kenton--but to do so, especially after Beatlemania struck in the 1960s, required ensembles like Herman's, Kenton's, Rich's and Maynard Ferguson's to make the rounds as high school and college "clinicians," followed by an evening concert. The repertory favored pop ephemera of the day as well as heavily weighted approximations of a rock and roll beat. (Buddy Rich became most notorious for his counterproductive stint as a rock and roll drummer/band leader in the late 60s/early 70s.) On this date, a concert from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, there's not even a walking bass line until about 40 minutes into the concert, when the band plays the old standard "Body and Soul." To Kenton's credit, he satisfied the audience's aversion to swing not by attempting to sound like the Grateful Dead but by falling back increasingly on the latin, Afro-Cuban rhythms and percussion instruments he had first experimented with during the 1950s."

Ugh!

Chris | Framingham, MA USA | 03/18/2000

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I consider myself a big Kenton fan -- this band was far from his best, combined with a lousy recording (which often comes with the territory with a live bootleg) makes this a big disappointment. Trumpets are terribly recorded and the solos are very weak."