Bruford
The Bottom Line
New York, NY
1979-07-13 early show

Bill Bruford-Drums, Percussion
Dave Stewart-Keys
Jeff Berlin-bass
"The Unknown" John Clark-Guitar

Source-"liberated cd boot" Adios A La Pasada" vg+ audience recording on unknown equipment> EAC disc extraction> further EQ in foobar> Audacity for normalization and minor editing described below> TLH for torrent creation> DIME

1 Hell's Bells
2 Sample And Hold
3 Fainting In Coils
4 Forever Until Sunday
5 Joe Frazier
6 Travels With Myself - And Someone Else
7 Beelzebub
8 The Sahara Of Snow Part 1
9 The Sahara Of Snow Part 2
10 Adios A La Pasada
11 Five G

I've had this cd-r boot for years that's now being "liberated". I hadn't realized that this show's never seemed to be up on DIME until looking for its history in the dimebot archive. Therefore, I hope it's new and welcome to some here. I went to this show, so I snapped this boot up when finding it in an NYC record store 20-25 years ago. The boot is called Adios A La Pasada, and it was on the Blue Cafe boot label. The cover is very much like the one on "The Bruford Tapes" official release.
Not sure at all about the recorder or gear used, but this is a very good audience for that time and venue. As to "The Unknown" John Clark, you'll hear someone near to the taper say "Who's that on guitar?" as Hell's Bells gets going. It was a surprise to many of us in those pre instant info days that Allan Holdsworth had already jumped ship. I'd have to say that John Clark did a really nice job in filling the shoes of the incredibly innovative, and seemingly irreplacable Holdsworth. It might be argued that John Etheridge did a finer job doing that for Soft Machine, but Clark isn't/wasn't too shabby either.
As good of an audience as this is, I did do some work to sweeten it a little. That was based on my feeling that some modern "post-production work" tools might help to strengthen the bottom end (given how much Bill's bass drum and Jeff Berlin did in punctuating it all), while accentuating a bit more on the top (hi-hats, cymbals, guitar lines, and Dave Stewart). That was done via EQ'ing the WAV files in foobar. Audacity was then employed for normalization (Beelzebub, for instance, had some big differences in the 2 channels). I also faded out and trimmed about 4 minutes of "MORE!!!!!!! and "YEAH!!!!" after Adios, and before the encore of 5G. The samples will give a good view of what to expect.
I remember thinking back then that with the music from Bruford's One of a Kind (showcased here); John McLaughlin's Electric Dreams (with the One Truth Band); David Sancious's True Stories and Just as I Thought; Oregon's Out of the Woods; Keith Jarrett's My Song; and Weather Report's Heavy Weather and Mr. Gone that creative music was peaking in a really nice new way and moving on from the promise seen in the fusion and prog from a few years earlier. That was very subjective, of course, and a little naive, but some of the audience's exuberance that you'll hear at this show is an indication that I wasn't alone in my excitement at what was being done.
That said, I went to this show with a work friend from those days and his soon to be wife. They were a bit "square" musically, but swayed by me to check it out after they'd enjoyed a Utopia show we'd gone to. They absolutely didn't "get it" at all when hearing Bruford, and they couldn't wait for the show to end. Go figure.....In any case, thanks to whoever recorded this way back when.