{"id":12970,"date":"2017-07-17T05:30:02","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T09:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=12970"},"modified":"2020-07-15T08:23:37","modified_gmt":"2020-07-15T12:23:37","slug":"album-review-emerson-lake-and-palmer-once-upon-a-time-in-south-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2017\/07\/17\/album-review-emerson-lake-and-palmer-once-upon-a-time-in-south-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Emerson Lake and Palmer \u2013 Once Upon a Time in South America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"By the early- to mid-1990s, ELP had seen its share of ups and downs. The band that had created some of the most compelling progressive (and often classical-leaning) rock of the 1970s had fallen victim not only to changing tastes, but \u2013 it must be said \u2013 to the vicissitudes of a post-creative-peak world. After 1978’s poorly-received Love Beach<\/i> \u2013 an album that (while no classic) is nowhere as dire as its reputation would have you believe \u2013 Emerson Lake and Palmer went on an extended hiatus. Each of the three men busied himself with other projects.<\/p>\n

In 1985, keyboard virtuoso Keith Emerson and guitarist\/bassist\/vocalist Greg Lake reunited, and found a drummer who was not only superb, but had a surname that began with the letter P. Emerson Lake & Powell released but one (self-titled) record, and it was pretty good for what it was. But \u2013 though the success of Asia might have suggested otherwise \u2013 there was no great market demand for ELP’s brand of progressive rock in the mid 1980s.<\/p>\n

By 1993 ELP was back together, having released the not-bad Black Moon<\/i> the year previous. In ’93 the trio released a live album, Live at the Royal Albert Hall<\/i>, which (predictably) was better, as it drew from the band’s entire catalog. The release schedule would continue apace with 1994’s retrospective box set, The Return of the Manticore<\/i>; the 4CD set was not wholly unlike King Crimson’s The Great Deceiver<\/i> box from 1992: a collection of live material, new and old, brought together to create a compelling if disjointed whole.<\/p>\n

Also in 1994, ELP would release what would be its final collection of new music, In the Hot Seat<\/i>. Sadly, it’s widely considered the trio’s poorest album. Countless live albums \u2013 sourced from concerts new and old \u2013 would follow in its wake. And by \u201ccountless,\u201d here I mean \u201cmore than a dozen.\u201d The band’s final concert took place in 2010. While all three remained active to various degrees, any hope for a reunion ended in 2016 with the deaths of both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake.<\/p>\n

It’s against this backdrop that the sprawling 4CD set Once Upon a Time in South America<\/i> is inevitably judged. And in that light, the verdict is not flattering. The set documents three concerts in full: two from April 1993 (Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina) and one from 1997 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). While the performances are good \u2013 not superb, not bad in any particular way \u2013 the audio quality is on the shrill and tinny side. Likely made for broadcast as opposed to general release, the recordings are of passable quality for their originally-intended purpose, but by any other standard, they’re subpar.<\/p>\n

Add to that the rhetorical question: does the world need three more live versions of Mussorgsky’s \u201cPictures at an Exhibition\u201d? Or three readings of the Emerson Lake & Powell-era \u201cTouch and Go\u201d? Or three essentially identical versions of \u201cTarkus\u201d?<\/p>\n

The set is not without its virtues: near the end of the Rio set, ELP turns in a song that it had actually rehearsed in its earliest days together, King Crimson’s \u201c21st<\/sup> Century Schizoid Man.\u201d The original, of course, featured Greg Lake on vocals. And the medley of Aaron Copland’s \u201cFanfare for the Common Man,\u201d Leonard Bernstein’s \u201cAmerica\u201d and Dave Brubeck’s \u201cRondo\u201d is impressive. (Both versions, in fact. But \u2026 still.)<\/p>\n

On one level, housing these three concerts in a single package makes a kind of sense: with so many other ELP live collections out there \u2013 many of which are vastly superior \u2013 without a doubt the market for Once Upon a Time in South America<\/i> is the completist fan. For him (or in rare cases, her), a single purchase is probably cheaper and easier than three separate transactions. But beyond that, this set defines redundancy. It’s really intended only for the Emerson Lake and Palmer Fan who simply must have it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the early- to mid-1990s, ELP had seen its share of ups and downs. The band that had created some of the most compelling progressive (and often classical-leaning) rock of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,49,56,62,65],"tags":[771,780],"class_list":["post-12970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compilation","category-new-release","category-prog","category-rawk","category-review","tag-elp","tag-emerson-lake-and-palmer","cat-19-id","cat-49-id","cat-56-id","cat-62-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12970"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19201,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12970\/revisions\/19201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}