Richard Barone – Cool Blue Halo 25th Anniversary Concert (2012)

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Recreating an album 25 years later is not always the easiest task to tackle — let alone being able to assemble the same exact musicians (including D.J. Vin Scelsa’s new introduction), but the ex-Bongos front man Richard Barone pulled it off. He’s also gotten better as a musician and a singer.

The two live CDs (RBM/Digsin) recreate all of the original LP’s tunes in the exact order, but also include some later songs (“River to River,” “Clouds over Eden,” “Glow,’ etc.) that Barone has created since then — as well as a couple of new covers, including the Rolling Stones’ “Child of the Moon” and the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” which definitely benefit from the original LP’s stripped-down baroque-pop format.

Famous wonderful guests include: Garth Hudson from the Band on accordion (“Love is a Wind that Screams,” “Glow”), Bowie/T-Rex producer Tony Visconti on bass (“The Man Who Sold the World,” “Gravity’s Pull”), Bongos bassist Rob Norris, and Donovan percussionist Candy John Carr.

The DVD has the majority of the concert CDs’ music represented — except, strangely enough, “Cry Baby Cry” — plus, there’s a ‘making of’ documentary amongst the bonus features of additional performances from the actual concert (“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Yet Another Midnight”) to make for a truly entertaining package.

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Steve Elliott