Studio vs Live album

Here's one of several previous threads about live records. Enjoy.

For example, much of Jazz is much better performed live than in the studio, a great example of this is the Bill Evans trio, they were at their best when they performed live, and their best album 'Sunday At The Village Vangaurd' happens to be a live performance itself. Of course inside jazz sometimes a studio recording works better, I can call back on Miles Davis' work with Gil Evans, never could 'Sketches of Spain' become what it was, without the use of the studio as a recording place.

Than there is the genre of pop. The best albums by pretty much all the major pop bands are studio albums, for example Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Revolver by the Beatles, Historie De Melodie Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg. All very 'produced' albums, that would not succeed if the music was recorded 'live'.

Than their is rock, my view towards this is slightly different, because rock often involved jamming, (specially in the case of the Grateful Dead, and in a more 'improvised' way, King Crimson) often the results from a live album actually was better than the studio recordings.

I could write more, but I'll live it there for now.

Thanks, Geoff

Then there is Rudy Van Gelder, who recorded a big chunk of the Blue Note catalog and records for many other labels cutting the tracks live to mono and later stereo with no post EQ or anything. There in lies some studio purity any Albini recording nerd could appreciate.

As for rock, there really is only a handful of great live albums, compared to a bunch of great studio records. I agree there are some bands that their live show is hard to translate.

I think the studio treated version wins hands down, though it is interesting to hear the source material, and Trio in particular has a stronger sense of spiritual and emotional exhaustion, most of it is just thinner, lesser.

Even more interesting is Craig Armstrong's version of Starless on his recent album when he layers strings over a loop of sections of Starless. Its a fantastic track and much improves on an already terrific track.

I guess what I am suggesting is that playing material live can give a musician perspective and insight into how the sounds are arranged (actually change 'playing live' to 'playing to an audience' as I think the important element is the audience feedback) so an ideal would be a live recording that is then treated back in the studio adding what has been 'learned' from the performance. I wonder if people ever use a live version of a track as a 'clicktrack' adding studio sections and removing live sections until all that is left on the tape is the spectre of the live recording.