Summer in the City Joe Jackson Manticore/Sony Classical, 2000 Buy it online Tracks 1: Summer in the City 2: Obvious Song 3: Another World 4: Fools in Love / For Your Love 5: Mood Indigo 6: The In Crowd / Down to London medley 7: Eleanor Rigby 8: Be My Number Two 9: Home Town 10: It's Different for Girls medley 11: King of the World 12: You Can't Get What You Want 13: One More Time   Reviewed by Claude Lalumière	Somewhere along the way, the relationship between music and recording got perverted. At first, the idea behind recording was to capture a musical moment, a performance. Records were not ends in and of themselves. They documented the real thing, the real thing being the musical performance itself. But as the music industry increasingly fetishized studio technology and as record companies pushed the idea of the record as the definitive musical statement so they could better control music, musicians and music lovers, the emphasis shifted. One of the big turning points, of course, was The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a phenomenally popular album conceived as a studio product: sound arranged rather than music played. Its songs were never intended to be performed. After that, it just got worse and worse. Too many recording artists of all stripes can't give a convincing live performance, so dependent they've grown on studio trickery. Musicians take months, sometimes years, recording less than an hour of music, tweaking and retweaking mixes and overdubs, seeking the illusory Holy Grail of the perfect sound, as if it mattered, as if there was supposed to be a Platonic ideal of each song. Whole musical genres based entirely on technology and shunning the idea of performance are flourishing, considered by many the state-of-the-art in music. Overdubs have even found their way into jazz, a musical genre based more than any other on the concept of musicians interacting organically with each other. Live albums are seen as contract fillers or as a way for recording artists to stay on record store shelves between "real" albums. I'm a heretic. For me, studio albums are the sham, the less-than-satisfying records that come out between the all-too-rare live albums that show the true, unfettered heart of music and musicians. I'm not saying that all live albums are better than any studio album. Some great songs have never been released as live recordings, some recording artists are poor performers, not all live albums are well recorded and too many fantastic musicians don't even have live albums. What I am saying is that live albums have the potential to be greater, to be a more honest and immediate artistic statement. The Name of This Band is Talking Heads (sadly never released on CD), John Coltrane's The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, John Cale's Fragments of a Rainy Season, Veda Hille's Women in (E)Motion, Neil Young's Weld, Eric Dolphy's The Illinois Concert, Portishead's Roseland NYC Live, Patti Smith's "My Generation" (a bonus live track on the 1996 re-release of her studio album Horses that makes me yearn all the more for a Patti Smith live album: why hasn't there been one after all these years?), Joe Jackson's Live 1980/86... that is the real stuff, the music to get hot and bothered about. Music that can't sit still, that screams "Listen to me!" Joe Jackson, whose last several albums (since 1989's Blaze of Glory) have suffered a severe case of studioitis, has, with the live release Summer in the City, made his music scream again. And what a beautiful, wonderful scream it is. With Summer in the City, Joe Jackson reaffirms his love of song. He revisits his own formidable catalog. He covers songs by The Lovin' Spoonful, The Yardbirds, Duke Ellington, The Beatles and Steely Dan. Especially exciting are a number of seamlessly woven -- and eclectic -- medleys. He combines his own "Fools in Love" with The Yardbirds' "For Your Love." He creates a wondrously epic -- yet intimate and moving -- four-song sequence comprising "Eleanor Rigby," "Be My Number Two," "Home Town," and "It's Different for Girls." The three-piece band is tight yet effervescent. Jackson and his cohorts eschew the contrivances of strict pop arrangements for a fluid and energetic style redolent of the best aspects of both jazz and rock 'n' roll. In the summer of 1999, Joe Jackson decided, "just for the hell of it", to do a series of small club shows in New York City with two old friends, bassist Graham Maby and drummer Gary Burke. The trio learned a lot of songs, then went out and "winged it" - each show was completely spontaneous (played with no set list) and each show was completely different. [From Joe Jackson's web site] I can't travel through time and go see each of these concerts (although I wish I could), but I can, because of Jackson's new album, get a glimpse of their energy and atmosphere. Summer in the City fulfills the original mandate of recording: preserving musical performances that would otherwise be lost to time forever. And this performance is essential: a raw and bursting Joe Jackson clearly having the best time of his life. | July 2000 Claude Lalumière is a Blue Coupe magazine contributing editor, as well as a freelance writer, editor, translator and publishing consultant. He owned and ran danger!, Montreal's chart-topping mid-1990s alternative bookstore. His published criticism can be found on his Web site.	Joe Jackson, whose last several albums (since 1989's Blaze of Glory) have suffered a severe case of studioitis, has, with the live release Summer in the City, made his music scream again. And what a beautiful, wonderful scream it is.