Live In Tasmania (Live)

Album review

John Fahey was well known as a perfectionist who played concerts for over two decades without releasing a live album. It was therefore something of a surprise when he not only recorded a full album in front of an audience, but did so at a concert booked on four days notice, at a hall he had never seen much less checked for acoustics, and with almost all material written on the spur of the moment. Fahey hadn't even planned on visiting Tasmania, but during an Australian concert tour he got drunk on an airplane flight and decided on the spur of the moment that he wanted to record an album there. A hall was booked, an audience rounded up, and the resulting show was recorded. The results were fantastic. The notoriously unpredictable Fahey was in a cheerful mood, playing an outstanding set and genially favoring the audience with a rambling monologue about the strangeness of finding Tasmania less wild and esoteric than he expected. A thoughtful version of "Waltzing Matilda" was a predictable crowd-pleaser, but so were more, er, esoteric pieces like "The Approaching of the Disco Void." The transcendent moment of this album, and one of the finest pieces of Fahey's career, is "Indian-Pacific R.R. Blues," a complex work that has elements of ragtime, blues, and Americana strung together into a magical whole. It was a marvelous gift to an audience that had probably never heard of him five days before, and it is fortunate indeed that this concert was not merely recorded, but captured brilliantly so that not a note was lost.

© Richard Foss /TiVo