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Jeff Buckley resented being called a folk singer, but he made his name playing solo sets like this one on the New York coffee circuit. Sony released this live EP before his first fully produced rock album, Grace, perhaps to attract attention to the raw power of Buckley's greatest gift, his voice. These four songs certainly accomplished that end. Buckley hurdles seemingly unreachable octaves, suspends notes for what seems like minutes, and belts out his falsetto without a scintilla of restraint. That's a positive inasmuch as it allowed him to show off his considerable talent; it's a negative when it sounded like he was showing off. But his ten-minute cover of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" is a tour de force of strumming and scatting, and his acoustic "Eternal Life" has an electricity that is paradoxically lacking on the plugged-in album version. [A deluxe edition released after his death added dozens of additional live tracks.]© Darryl Cater /TiVo

The morbid fascinations, myths, and legends that spring up around the untimely deaths of rock stars were phenomena that Jeff Buckley vehemently detested. In the wake of Buckley's own demise, his mother, Mary Guibert, along with his former bandmembers and fans, worked tirelessly to downplay the hyperbolic press the man and his music have endured. Surprisingly, the most successful move Guibert and company made to this end was to release a pair of incendiary live records, 2000's Mystery White Boy and 2001's import-only Live a l'Olympia. Recorded over two nights in July of 1995, the tapes that comprise l'Olympia are, even by Buckley's own usually self-deprecating estimate, the finest display of his talent as a consummate performer. His concerts -- and these two were no exception -- were transcendent; blistering, overwhelming, and ecstatic, they bordered on the supernatural. However, he could also croon tender love songs, and was often hilarious -- here he audibly (but lovingly) mimics the great Edith Piaf (keep in mind, he's in front of a French audience) and convincingly speeds through a truncated cover of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" at a simulated 45 rpm. Though the album was mastered from a soundboard cassette, the sound quality is excellent, making it relatively easy to overlook minor problems with fidelity, especially when considering the performance itself. Buckley and his band revel in the wild adoration of their fans (something they hadn't experienced prior to the Olympia gigs), and eventually reduce the crowd to a hushed, awe-inspired mass, more a congregation than an audience. Lest you balk at the import price tag the album carries, know that Buckley's live shows were the lifeblood of his music. On Live a l'Olympia, songs from his sole studio LP, Grace, as well as unreleased tracks and cover tunes, become entirely different entities, exploding and writhing with unrestrained passion, then calming in a solemn but reverential display of love and respect. In the end, l'Olympia is the best proof that Jeff Buckley's greatest legacy is his lust for life, dynamic personality, and -- above all -- his music.© Bryan Carroll /TiVo

Live from the Bataclan presents four songs from a 1995 performance in Paris. It captures the magic of an entranced, adoring audience as they listen to the vocal acrobatizing and seductive voice of Jeff Buckley. (It's also a surprisingly large crowd, considering how short a time Grace had been out.) Overall, the selections are very quiet and tender -- just voice and guitar -- but the loud tune (and only one with the band) comes first: a slightly stretched out incarnation of "Dream Brother," and a particularly throat-ripping, emotionally tortured rendition at that. Next comes a galloping 12-minute clap-along version of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do." By the time Buckley switches over to French during his delivery of a medley of "Je N'En Connais Pas la Fin " and "Hymne a L'Amour," the crowd erupts at the end of every phrase, catching him off guard with their enthusiasm. It gets to be a bit much, and the crowd almost manages to cut the song short with their enthusiastic approval, but the evident enjoyment of all present will be shared by fans. The last selection is a nearly ten-minute version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." During it, the crowd momentarily becomes the backing choir, softly chanting "hallelujah" while Buckley takes it quieter until the song eventually dwindles out.© Joslyn Layne /TiVo

For this album, Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta has chosen a program of arrangements of vocal music, the majority of which come from French opera. The result is a pleasant if plain recital. Most of the selections are straight transcriptions in which the cello simply plays the vocal line, accompanied by orchestra. Gabetta's playing is warmly lyrical but unexceptional, and not much personality or interpretive originality comes across. Even a showstopper like the Seguidilla from Carmen, which ought to be an opportunity for flamboyant display (and it's certainly treated that way by the singers) is blandly straightforward. The Prague Philharmonic, led by Charles Olivieri-Munroe, offers a supportive accompaniment. The piece that's the most fun is an arrangement of Largo al factotum from Il barbiere di Siviglia, made by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for cello and piano. It is quite a departure from Rossini and is full of zany surprises, allowing Gabetta to display some virtuosity. The album is most likely to be of interest to listeners looking for mellow, restful selections that could be used as background music.© TiVo

Jeff Buckley recorded the ten tracks that comprise the 2016 compilation You and I in February 1993, roughly four months after he signed to Columbia Records. He'd start recording Grace, his lone completed studio album, with producer Andy Wallace a few months after he laid down these sketches, but despite containing a solo demo of "Grace," the closest connection to the music on You and I is the coffeehouse crooner showcased on Live at Sin-e, the EP released as a teaser toward the conclusion of 1993. Like that EP and its accompanying 2003 expansion, You and I relies on covers delivered by Buckley, accompanied by nothing more than his electric guitar, strummed as if it were an acoustic. Much of the repertoire showcased on this album will be familiar to any Gen-Xer who attended college during the height of alternative rock: classic rock numbers intertwined with the Smiths and standards, and tunes chosen to telegraph the singer's influences while also providing context for the originals. Occasionally, there's a slight surprise -- Buckley attempts Bukka White's Delta stomp on a slippery, slurred version of "Poor Boy Long Way from Home" -- but usually, You and I feels of a piece with the rest of his early work: he zeroes in on both the funk and spectral qualities of Zeppelin, he elongates Bob Dylan, plays "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'" relatively straight, and he finds his heart in Morrissey & Marr, drawing equally from the heartbreak and jangle. All these tunes may have been composed by other writers, but in Buckley's hands they seem to belong to him, which is the highest compliment that can ever be paid to a vocalist.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

To say that André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's 1784 comic opera, Richard Coeur de Lion, has a lot to answer for is something of an understatement, when it was its popular Act I air, “O Richard, O my King”, which in 1789 accidentally brought about one of the defining moments of the French Revolution: the air is sung by the imprisoned King Richard's knights who want to free him, and one night in 1789 it became the song French officers chose to sing to King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette under house arrest at Versailles after the couple turned up to greet the officers at a banquet thrown in the Royal Opera House; which in turn got interpreted by the Paris press as an anti-revolutionary act, leading to the palace being stormed and the royal couple taken away, never to return. Add the fact that Grétry was none other than Marie-Antoinette's favourite composer, and the opera was an obvious choice for the Royal Opera House's 250th anniversary season. Plus, the October 2019 production under the direction of Hervé Niquet was a wonderful one: fizzing with vivacious energy and fun, nailing its grandeur and intimacy in equal measure, all with just the right dose of heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, and from a no-exceptions superb cast of young talent - headed up by tenors Rémy Mathieu as Richard and Reinoud Van Mechelen as Blondel - supported by an on-fire Le Concert Spirituel. So, although with this live recording you don't get to enjoy the production's sumptuous late eighteenth century stage sets and concerts, the music making was of a level for it all still to be leaping out of the stereo regardless. What's more, the polished, immediate engineering has done a magnificent job of capturing the theatre's acoustics, meaning you really do feel as if you're sat there in the theatre's best seats. Then, while one might imagine that non-French speakers may get less out of the audio alone, given that the opera's action moves forwards not via sung recitatives but instead spoken texts, the reality is that the vim and melodious tones with which those spoken lines are dispatched actually amounts to a sort of music in itself. In short, thank goodness they snuck this one in before Covid, because it's a life-affirming triumph. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

Because Jeff Buckley died after having only released one official studio album -- and a fantastic one at that -- fans and friends were unfortunately left to wonder what could have been instead of being able to see it first hand. Fortunately, Buckley had other recorded evidence of his immense talent besides the ten songs on Grace. He was a live performer as much, if not more, as he was a studio musician, and his Monday-night residence at New York's now-defunct Sin-é in the early '90s lent itself to an EP and an extended two-CD set, and other bits of shows were captured on the various other releases that peppered record shelves after the singer's untimely departure. The closest thing we got to a second album was 1998's Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which, as the title indicates, was not necessarily a complete work, though most of the songs in themselves are finished-sounding and exciting enough to be interesting. What this means, of course, is that there's more than enough material to compile a "greatest-hits" collection, which is, in essence, what the Mary Guibert- (Buckley's mother) and Tom Burleigh-compiled So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley is. Unfortunately, it also claims to be a little more than that, with exclusive tracks and pictures not heard or seen elsewhere. In reality, most of the 14-song record is taken from Grace, specifically the 2004 Legacy edition, which had included a bonus track, "Forget Her," as well as alternate versions of songs like "Dream Brother" and "Eternal Life" -- the latter of which has hard-edged electric guitars that reflect the grunge that was happening contemporarily -- and Buckley's arguably two "biggest" songs, "Last Goodbye" and the fragile cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." The Sin-è sessions are also given a brief nod, with live cuts of Edith Piaf's "Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin" and the lovely "Mojo Pin," as is Sketches' ("Everybody Here Wants You" and "The Sky Is a Landfill"). The biggest attractions then, for fans who already own these albums, are the two previously unreleased cuts: the live acoustic version on "So Real" and live in-studio cover of the Smiths' haunting "I Know It's Over," on which Buckley manages to conjure up the presence of Moz while still making it very much his own. Both of these should be of no surprise to a serious fan -- "I Know It's Over" is even attached to the end of "Hallelujah" on the live album Mystery White Boy -- but it is nice to have all these tracks together at once. This is Buckley at his strongest and most affecting, and while Grace itself probably acts as the best introduction to the late musician, So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley, still offers a good, honest portrayal of everything he was and all that he had.© Marisa Brown /TiVo

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