Beirach Steady 2: Quest In Show

Quest - M.D.

We're back and bopping, with more 'Rach and roll to follow up yesterday's helping of Heinz Sauer -- in which our hero served up some mighty tasty piano, as if he was capable of playing anything not mighty tasty -- with a whole main course of delicious blissness that brings Richie Beirach more out front, where players and writers of his Galaxy-class distinction belong.

Obviously he passed at the end of January, and no tribute I could articulate could do justice to a figure of this massive musical magnitude. But I'll try.

I'm trying to think if I ever saw him play in person and I don't think I ever did, sad to say. As for the first time I ever came across him, it must have been in college 40 years ago. I remember when I first became aware of his ECM LPs, thinking this is sort of the natural heir to Bill Evans.

Of course he's really more similar to McCoy Tyner, but these comparisons come and go like fashion models on the runway. If you had to describe in words what Richie Beirach was about when seated at a piano, you wouldn't be too wrong if you placed him somewhere between those two pillars of Jazz keyboard foundation, with a whole vocabulary of Classical understanding underpinning the vibe.

Abstract and obtusely awkward comparisons aside, I guess when people think of Richie Beirach, they're always going to think of his association with Dave Liebman and the heavenly music their lifelong collaboration produced.

Almost inextricably linked, it's not unfactual to say that what those two guys got into, in so many different configurations, is gonna be hard to top. This, just in terms of several, accumulated decades of the rarity that happens when two people of such a high musical caliber stick together that long. When they become noticeably and reliably telepathic with each other on a stage or in a recording environment.

Of course what those two guys produced over the course of all those years playing together is almost a damn record collection in itself, but there's some unissued stuff well worth hearing too.

Here's a few hours from German radio, recorded more or less recently, that depicts them both in a duo setting and in the band they ran together for over four decades, in a Quest to put all the meat on some of the bone. Just a small fragment of what RB and his buddy Lieb could whip up on a Jazz loving public all over the globe.

David Liebman & Richie Beirach

Jazzfest Bonn

Kammermusiksaal

Beethovenhaus

Bonn, Germany

5.6.2016

01 Pendulum

02 Master of the Obvious 

03 Redial 

04 Testament 

05 RB announcement

06 Rectilinear

07 RB announcement

08 Kurtland

09 Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise 

10 All Blues (fragment)

Total time: 1:12:57

David Liebman – tenor saxophone

Richie Beirach – piano

Tracks 01-04: 256/44k digital FM FLAC stream, captured by Lewojazz

Tracks 05-10: 320/48k digital FM mp2 stream, captured by Lewojazz & converted to 16/44 CD Audio by EN

assembled, edited, retracked and remastered for unity by EN, February 2026
383 MB FLAC/link is below

Quest

53rd Deutsches Jazzfestival

HR Sendesaal

Frankfurt, Germany

10.26.2022

01 introduction by Jürgen Schwab

02 Pendulum

03 band intros & announcement by RB

04 M.D.

05 Rectilinear

06 RB announcement

07 Testament

08 Master of the Obvious

09 RB announcement

10 Elm

11 Footprints

12 unidentified title

Total time: 1:15:27

David Liebman - saxophones & flute

Richie Beirach - piano

Ron McClure - bass

Billy Hart - drums

320/48k digital FM FLAC stream, captured by Lewojazz

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, retracked & remastered -- with a few tracks in the Quest set demux-denoised -- by EN, February 2026
480 MB FLAC/direct link to both shows in same folder

This concludes the first half of February. I'll be back around starting next weekend with a full slate of Black History Month stuff.

As for our hero of the 88 keys, I can't believe he's gone on into history now, but everyone dies eventually. What supersedes mere physical death is the idea that while he was here, Richie Beirach combined an extensive Classical knowledge with a finetooth compositional comprehension steeped in the deepest Jazz to produce a one-of-a-kind sensibility and style. One multifaceted enough to inform what will go on for a whole lotta players when they take a seat at the piano for generations to come.--J.

5.23.1947 - 1.26.2026

Beirach Steady 1: Valiant Heinz Day

Heinz Sauer Quintet - Norma Lee

We'll initiate the weekend of tribute to a fallen keyboard star with a burning 40th anniversary concert that features him in the band of a highly undersung German Jazz icon.

This one will be followed by an even more extensive round of exquisite live music tomorrow, as we roll on with February like Sisyphus up the hill.

The man with the horn is Heinz Sauer, a Christmas baby from Frankfurt who started in the 1950s and gradually became more electronic-oriented as he went down the decades.

He is 93 now and largely retired, but in the many decades he was active he played with ten million people, among them Richie Beirach, the piano Maestro largely associated with the ECM label who passed away a couple of weeks ago.

We'll get further into the 'Rach scene tomorrow, but he's certainly so mere side voice in this concert, which also features Polish trumpet deity Tomasz Stańko on 3 of the 4 tunes.

There aren't too many Heinz Sauer ROIOs, so this here is like precious platinum, gleaned and cleaned by me from a DVD.

Heinz Sauer Quintet

20th Deutsches Jazz Festival

Sendesaal des Hessischen Rundfunks

Frankfurt, Germany

2.14.1986

01 Cherry Bat

02 Norma Lee

03 Meadow Bells

04 I Want to Die Easy When I Die

Total time: 1:03:47

Heinz Sauer - soprano & tenor saxophones

Tomasz Stańko - trumpet

Richie Beirach - piano

Thomas Heidepriem - bass

Thomas Cremer - drums

224/48K audio extracted from a PAL DVD of a European digital satellite broadcast

edited, tracked & remastered by EN, February 2026
361 MB FLAC/direct link

Like I said, this is just the first part of a two part thing, but since it was taped 40 years ago today I couldn't see why I shouldn't wedge it in before the larger chunk of Beirach tomorrow.

And of course we get to give a shoutout to Heinz Sauer -- as expressive a tenor player as has ever emerged from Germany -- born way back in 1932 and thankfully still with us!--J.

Birth Defector

Steve Hackett - The Steppes

Keeping the happiness flowing, we'll continue the February blizzard conditions with a beard post par excellence. So what's a beard post?

A beard post is no big deal, really. It's just where I have something that consists of officially released material I don't necessarily want out front on the page, so I cook up something to occupy the frontfacing aspect on here and slip the thing or things subtly into the folder alongside. Or provide some links in the text to it you'd have to read through this babble to come across.

Today is one of those times where I use someone's birthday to sort of slide, in this case, a pretty wild companion compendium, shall we say, onto the web and into the world.

So anyway: if you know who Steve Hackett is -- and I can't see how anyone doesn't, Steve Hackett being one of the greatest guitar players currently alive for 50+ years now -- you know he started in Genesis way back in 1971, when Peter Gabriel (24 hours younger than Steve, and 76 tomorrow) answered his ad in the Melody Maker about wanting to surpass stagnant musical forms and whatnot.

And if you know the inside baseball of this stuff, you know that Genesis is, beyond argument, the Hall Of Fame band whose catalog is the most poorly -- you might say, pathetically -- represented in the world at large.

Earlier this year they put out a box set of one of their records that begins to maybe fix this issue, but the rest of their albums inhabit a netherworld of the music business that makes you just scratch the hair right off your head. To make it worse, their remaining catalog was recently sold, in a multi-million dollar deal, to a music conglomerate that may never reissue any of it in a halfway reasonable form worthy of the material.

Essentially the only iterations of their records -- comprising some of the most globally beloved music of our epoch, mind you -- in this century exist on ear-splattering CDs, and on vinyl irresponsibly made from those CDs, which feature perhaps the most offensive example of Noise Wars overmastering that may ever (or should ever) be. These were in box sets issued from 2007-2009, and if I were to tell you they were unlistenable travesties of the lowest order, I'd be underestimating their atrocity-level awfulness. By a lot.

These box sets -- which now command collectors'-level prices on Discogs.com -- thankfully also contained 5.1 surround mixes of everything. They somehow lacked the completely brickwalled, eardrum-frying mastering nonsense of the CDs and actually sound rather pleasant if you can make peace with Nick Davis's often-puzzling remixing choices.

So what do you do? Most folks don't have Surround Sound setups in their homes, and what about the car? If you're gonna pop Firth of Fifth into the CD player in the SUV and roll through the countryside like a Tony Banks piano intro, you're gonna need stereo downmixes of all of the G Golden Age albums from 1970-1984, aren't you? Who is gonna spend the weeks meticulously cooking it all down to 16/44 stereo for you? Is there an app for that, kids? Maybe we can just shout half-intelligible instructions into Chat GPT and trundle off for a bong rip or three?

Ah, there's the facial hair we were talking about, although Maestro Hackett never sported the full beard, so we'll have to settle for the vintage 1973 moustache today, apologies in advance. Anyway I was gonna sneak these into last October's Mike Rutherford 75 post, but what with the whole Genesis Gigaleak shenanigans that briefly took down The Movement site being super hot at that time, I decided to be discreet and wait until Steve Hackett turned 76. Which happens to have been today!

Anyhow... If you click this text block, you'll be taken to a folder that has all the goodies, up to and including wild compilations I made as companions to the proper LPs. These contain ridiculously accurate reconstructions of period singles and the unreleased, reconstituted album suites from A Trick of the Tail and Abacab, etc etc. Because I'm categorically insane, there's even a bonus compilation I made a bit later on right here. (***EDIT*** Someone, in private, has asked, with some indignation, why I didn't downmix the 5.1s of Invisible Touch to stereo to take the G set to the end of the 1980s, but rather than bloviate about how much I hate that album, I just did it, complete with the appropriate bonus tracks! You're welcome.)

So there's the secret face... what about the beard again? Did I mention Steve Hackett -- of all the erstwhile members associated with the Genesis brand, easily the one you'd cast as the biggest current torchbearer for their classic 1970s output -- is 76 today? Here he is 46 years ago on his Defector tour, electrifying Sheffield City Hall in a vintage home turf gig of splendidness.

Steve Hackett

Hallam Steppes

City Hall

Sheffield, UK

6.17.1980

CD1

01 FM intro/Slogans

02 Every Day

03 The Red Flower of Tachai Blooms Everywhere

04 Tigermoth

05 Kim

06 Time to Get Out

07 The Steppes

08 The Toast

09 Narnia

10 acoustic medley (incl. Lost Time In Cordoba, Blood On the Rooftops & Horizons)

CD2

01 Sentimental Institution

02 Jacuzzi

03 Spectral Mornings

04 A Tower Struck Down

05 Clocks - The Angel of Mons

06 Land of a Thousand Autumns

07 Please Don't Touch

08 The Show/It's Now or Never

09 Hercules Unchained

Total time: 1:32:46

Steve Hackett - guitars & vocals

Dik Cadbury - bass

Pete Hicks - vocals

Nick Magnus - keyboards

John Hackett - flute, guitar, bass pedals & vocals

John Shearer - drums & percussion

off-air Hallam Radio FM capture of indeterminate origin

sourced from the 2001 bootleg CD "Hallam Steppes" on the Tachika Records label

declipped, denoised & slightly retracked -- with acoustic tracks volume boosted -- by EN, February 2026
605 MB FLAC/direct link

Of course, in keeping with the beardly theme of the day, I wouldn't dare place the 2CD mixtape of Steve Hackett's solo stuff -- covering his initial 1975-1983 post-G period -- I keep in my phone into that folder alongside the concert, no way absolutely not. I also didn't dare expand it by 9 tracks before not doing that, either. Never happened.

I'll be back to inundate the weekend with Piano Jazz, as we 'rach around the clock in honor of a recently-interred keyboard deity. But that's then... this is now, and now it's an amble up The Steppes in honor of Steve Hackett, born this day in 1950 and still out there Progging it up like someone a third his age!--J.

A Fiddle Goes a Long Way: Didier Lockwood 70

Didier Lockwood Group - Mahadevi

We're really in the thick of it this week, with 4 in 5 days beginning with a French Fusion fountainhead, sadly long gone from our realm, but born this very day in 1956.

Most music geeks know him from Christian Vander's ridiculously amazing concept band Magma, whom I've had on here before because let's be honest, can you trust a page that doesn't at least mention Magma?

I guess if you're gonna be known for a musical association you could do way worse than Magma, but to me Didier Lockwood is way more than just the violin voice in Vander's Opera-Rock-On-Other-Worlds arsenal.

I mean, the man recorded 20 records under his own name, in addition of course to however many collaborations where he appeared on someone else's LP.

Another of those rare, you-know-who-it-is-from-one-bar instrumentalists we try to plaster all over this page like gorgeous graffiti on a 1970s Bronx subway car, DL was never on the D.L. when it came to his instantly identifiable phrasing, tone, and the distinctive bite his playing always seemed to feature.

I guess if you heard him tell it, his playing was most influenced -- like a billion other fiddle folk -- by Stéphane Grappelli. Which is always in evidence in whatever he plays; some of the bite comes from a bounce he essentially inherited from SG, a deity of the instrument in every imaginable way.

I guess he first went electric in the 1960s -- that was a big thing then, oh look! I plugged in! -- after hearing Jean-Luc Ponty play an amplified violin.

Whilst JLP has a universe all his own, I actually prefer the music of Didier Lockwood, which might contain less notes-per-composition, but carries with it a much more intense Energy Music imprint along the lines of a Pharoah Sanders, for instance.

Naturally this is all subjective, and trying to describe music in words can be like trying to Scotch Tape a bowl of soup to a chalkboard, but I think what I'm getting at is clear.

Which is that if I was putting together the ultimate Fusion ensemble, the violin chair might go to Didier Lockwood over perhaps more popular and better-selling choices.

Anyway I've wanted to have him on here for ages, and although he passed away in 2018 too soon and just a week shy of 63, today being his 70th birthday seemed like the perfect moment.

There aren't a whole heckuva lot of ROIOs of him doing his own thing -- he's often featured in the bands of others and in all-star bands of various themes -- but there are a few.

Such as this woefully undercirculated broadcast from the early 1990s, which finds the Maestro out on home turf in a triumphant set.

Didier Lockwood Group

Studio Merlin

Paris, France

2.2.1991

01 Phoenix 90

02 My Blues

03 Paso

04 Mahadevi

05 Panama Split

06 Itxie

07 Polish

08 Brasilia

09 Cartoon

10 Alegria

11 Paul et Yves 

12 Stormy Day

13 B Train Blues

Total 1:23:38

disc break goes after Track 07

Didier Lockwood - violin & WX7 saxophone

Jean Marie Ecay - guitar

Philip Guez - keyboards & electronics

Laurent Vernerey - bass

Loic Pontieux - drums

finkployd49's off-air cassette FM master capture of the original "Jazz Mag" broadcast over Europe 1

demuxed, remux-rebalanced, edited, retracked & remastered by EN, February 2026
619 MB FLAC/direct link

The mix in this, while well-captured by the ORTF, was a tad drummy so I used the AI stem tool to rebalance it a smidge. Nothing too insane or radical though, tempting as it was to create a dub remix that put the whole 83 minutes through a Lee "Scratch" Perry-style series of cascading echo machines and dropped the drums out every 16 bars.

I will be smashing away at the sculpting stone all week here, resuming tomorrow with a really weird post that will make all the Prog Rock partisans pee themselves with pleasure. But not before we resin our collective bows and celebrate the late and great Didier Lockwood on his big birthday today!--J.

2.11.1956 - 2.18.2018