LIVE IN GERMANY

It is interesting to be able to listen to Ekseption LIVE. However, I'm terribly sorry to say, that various musicians -Rick van der Linden included - make horrible mistakes. Why did they choose this evening to be their first and only live CD? One is simply not used to hearing Rick and the others playing wrongly and shoddily! Actually, the more you listen to this CD, the more you just wait for the next blunder. It's really a shame, because the choice of songs is fine.

This album was recorded live during two concerts in Germany in November 1993, and I don`t know if these concerts were part of a long or of a short tour, or only were two isolated reunion concerts. For these concerts, anyway, old members from the Ekseption of the seventies Rick van der Linden, Rein van der Broek and Dick Remelink were joined by other two very good musicians (Max Werner on drums and Frans Muys Van Der Moer on bass). The combination of these musicians while playing old musical pieces from Ekseption brought some differences in the musical playing, particularly in the case of drummer Werner, and some of the arrangements are a bit different. But also the use of more modern musical instruments, particularly in the use of then new keyboards, made the musical pieces sound a bit different. I have to say that I really expected a better live album, as other reviewers have said in this and in other websites. The recording and mixing is very good, but the playing of some of the musical pieces (particularly very clear in "Sabre Dance") has some mistakes. I don`t know if this happened because it was a long tour and they were tired, or maybe they didn`t have enough rehearsals, or maybe the concerts they recorded they were not in their best playing. But it was good to me to listen to these very good musicians playing these very good musical pieces in front of an audience, even with all the imperfections. And one can think that this album really wasn`t overdubbed in a studio. So, at least, it is an honest record in that respect. Not as bad as other reviewers consider it to be, but not as good as I expected it to be before listening to it and reading those reviews. Maybe one day their old record label (Philips) could release a live album recorded in the seventies with their best line-up (in my opinion): van der Linden, van der Broek, Remelink, plus Cor Dekker on bass and Peter de Leeuwe on drums. Unfortunately, now a reunion of this line-up is not possible anymore with the deaths of Dekker (in November 2005), van der Linden (in January 2006) and de Leeuwe (on February 4, 2014, as Ekseption / Rick van der Linden`s official website recently announced). So, this live album recorded in 1993, remains until now as the only live album that the band released. So, it is good for my taste anyway.