This is a live recording from the Montreux Jazz Festival, rightly famed. Listen to enough jazz radio and you're likely to hear it. And no wonder. It cooks as jazz and as a protest song.
It's kind of weird, though, that McCann spends much of the second verse going off on dogs and the people who love them. Just out of nowhere, "You know what? Fuck dogs!" Makes me wonder if he farmed the verse out to squirrels.
2 comments:
That was a wonderful performance - such amazing skill and creativity in the time when music was still sacred. I've heard it before but it was very nice to actually see them perform.
It's remarkable, albeit depressing, just how relevant the song continues to be so many years in the future.
I could only watch bits of the documentary Soul to Soul but it's pretty wild that so many great black performers, including Les McCann and Eddie Harris were in Ghana for that huge outdoor concert.
Seeing them perform is a revelation. You see how well they worked with and fed off the energy of the crowd.
Harris was a great musician and songwriter and keen observer. Or maybe I should say "is." He's still around, although Eddie Harris passed on more than 25 years ago.
Ghana must have been an exciting place to be at the time, for that and other reasons. Sometimes places just have a surfeit of things going on.
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