Concert recording of the week: Cowboy Junkies at the Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver (1996)
Since I was a teenager in the 80s, I’ll begin with a band from that era who have encouraged recording and sharing of their live shows: Cowboy Junkies (main archive page here). The Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session (1988), which was recorded in a church in Toronto, sounded entirely new — and haunting — to me back in the day (still did when I recently transferred it from vinyl this year), and just about everyone else my age in Toronto seemed to know about that album. This band is in many respects a jam band, whose live shows vary from night to night and who engage in considerable improvisation. Their covers of standards in entirely new ways really stand out to me.
There are many, many freely available recordings of Cowboy Junkies’ live shows on archive.org. The one I’ve been enjoying most lately is a great quality soundboard recording:
- Cowboy Junkies at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, 1996 (FLAC – via archive.org).
(For those who aren’t aware, FLAC and, less common, SHN formats are the best quality formats to download and do not result in any loss of sound quality. For downloading shows from archive, I would suggest using Firefox with the free DownloadThemAll plugin which allows you to quickly identify the links for each song in FLAC and download them quickly.)
