Roberta Flack
"Live Under the Sky"
Yomiuri-Land East
Tokyo, Japan
7.28.1985

CD1
01 I Keep Forgetting
02 Love Was Never Meant for Me
03 Killing Me Softly
04 Feel Like Makin' Love
05 I Can See the Sun In Late December
06 Set Free
07 Gentle On My Mind

CD2
01 Suzanne
02 River
03 Love Light In Flight
04 Where Is the Love
05 The Closer I Get to You
06 One On One
07 Whole Truth
08 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
09 If I Am Still Around Tomorrow

Total time: 1:32:41

Roberta Flack - vocals, piano
Barry Miles - keyboards
Larry McRae - bass
Howard King - drums
Phillip Hamilton - guitar
Harry Whitaker - keyboards
Zene Zacharoff - keyboards
Dennis Collins - vocals
Gabrielle Goodman - vocals

sounds like an FM master reel, remastered and repaired by EN 2018-2019

original notes:
This torrent is from "Live Under The Sky '85." "Live Under The Sky" was an open-air music festival literally which was held in Tokyo from 1977 to 1992.

original lineage: SBD > FM > ?? > Trade CDR > EAC > .wav > split tracks (SoundEngine Free) > FLAC frontend (level 5) > .flac
Sound Quality: A

notes on the remaster:
This is something I've tried to fix before, and been hoping would get recirculated for years, but which I've never seen online since back when I first got it in 2005. How it isn't more widely distributed may owe to some of the issues I will detail here.

Firstly and foremostly it's the dropouts/digiskips that either happened in the tape transfer or in a CD generation subsequently. There were 9 instances in 8 different songs where a very small portion of music was dropped and it just pops ahead. As a drummer I hear these interruptions as if they were 40,000,000 nails on 400,000 blackboards; my inner groove is disturbed by them to no end. So I set about repairing them in my inimitable substitution fashion, making microrepairs using material from elsewhere in a song to reconstitute the missing pieces. Some of these edits take hours but I refuse to give up until they are in place and as seamless as can be made possible.

The sound was the other issue: this was captured kind of flat and drained of the lush harmonics present in the performance. I used the typical Sound Forge 11 Graphic EQ and Graphic Dynamics tools to bring the sonic architecture of it into line with the stratospheric, transcendent quality of the show, and I'd like to think I succeeded. Obviously if anyone has a transfer of this without all the skippage I'd be obliged if you'd please share it so I can remaster it again.

This concert is really as good as archival music gets, with Roberta sending the normally reserved Japanese audience into full-on roaring and clapping participation in nearly every tune. Since it's her 82nd birthday on Sunday, I thought it was finally time to tackle its glaring sonic issues and turn it into a definitive edition of itself, at least until a better FM transfer or a pre-FM source can bubble to the top. Enjoy! --EN, Feb. 2019

updated lineage:
FLACs from EZT, June 2005 > CDR > wav va EAC > remasterizzations and surgical repairings > FLAC 8 via DB Poweramp > DIME > you, being killed softly with these songs




Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.

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