Live at Keystone is an album by Merl Saunders, Jerry Garcia, John Kahn, and Bill Vitt. It was recorded live at the KeystoneinBerkeley, California on July 10 and 11, 1973, and released later that year as a two-disc vinyl LP.[1][2] It was re-released in 1988, with additional tracks, as two separate CDs, called Live at Keystone Volume I and Live at Keystone Volume II.[3][4][5][6]
From February 1971 to July 1975, Merl Saunders and Jerry Garcia often played live shows together when the Grateful Dead were not on tour. For many of those concerts, their band had the lineup featured on this album – Saunders on keyboards, Garcia on guitar and vocals, John Kahn on bass, and Bill Vitt on drums.[7] One track of Live at Keystone, "Positively 4th Street", also includes David Grismanonmandolin.
OnAllmusic, Lindsay Planer wrote, "... let the music speak for itself as Live at Keystone is chocked with inspired covers, each respectively extended and collectively improvised by co-instrumental leads Jerry Garcia (guitar/vocals) and Merl Saunders (organ) with Bill Vitt (drums) and John Kahn (bass). This was an ad-hoc configuration, as opposed to the organized touring unit that Garcia developed as the Jerry Garcia Band. From December of 1970 until the spring of 1974 — prior to the combo evolving into the Legion of Mary — the guitarist could often be found performing sporadically in and around San Francisco between engagements with the Grateful Dead. The quartet ably fuse rock with jazz in their spacy unfettered jams. These emerge from an eclectic composite of R&B and blues to seminal rock oldies and even popular standards."[4]
In 1988, Fantasy Records released two single-disc LPs with more music recorded at the shows of July 10 and 11, 1973 — Keystone Encores Volume I and Keystone Encores Volume II. They also released a single-disc CD, Keystone Encores, containing six of the eight tracks from the LPs.[8][9][10]
In 2012, the label released a four-CD album called Keystone Companions: The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings. This contains remastered versions of all the tracks from the Live at Keystone and Keystone Encores albums (except for the track titled "Space"), plus seven previously unreleased tracks from the same dates. The songs on Keystone Companions are presented in the order they were performed in concert.[11][12]
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