James Taylor One Man Band CD

With ONE MAN BAND, James Taylor becomes the third major musical icon, after Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell, to sign with the Starbucks-affiliated music label Hear Music for a new releases. Unlike Mitchell and McCartney, Taylor is using his fresh start to take a well-deserved retrospective look over the course of his career. ONE MAN BAND is a two-disc set incorporating a live concert and a documentary DVD. The DVD is an exhaustive work directed by filmmaker Sydney Pollack that mixes new live concert material and interviews with rare archival footage, including both vintage television appearances and, appropriately for a documentary about an artist who has treated his musical career as a lifelong running autobiography, home movies and personal photographs. True to the album's title, the live concert on the CD features just Taylor's warm, mellow voice and his soulful, folk-influenced acoustic guitar. Recorded live in front of a hometown crowd in the hills of western Massachusetts, these 19 songs stretch back over 40 years, all the way to his first single, "Something in the Way She Moves," and include fine renditions of all his most beloved songs as well as several wry anecdotes about them. ONE MAN BAND is an intimate portrait nicely executed.
Don't take the title of James Taylor's One Man Band literally -- this 2007 concert recording may be stripped-down but it's not just James and a guitar, he's supported by keyboardist Larry Goldings, whom Taylor dubs his "one-man band" in the liner notes, as that's all the backing band he has here. Fair enough. But this isn't just a question of clever semantics: as it turns out, Goldings has quite a presence on this intimate album, recorded at a three-night stint at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, MA, during July 2007. During this 19-song set, Taylor gives Goldings plenty of space to grace the songs with solos that show up his jazz chops. This freedom, coupled with Taylor's deceptively easy delivery -- he has a casual authority that comes from touring the same songs steadily for years -- gives this album a unique character among Taylor's catalog. This also makes for an album that relies heavily on standards. All the songs you'd expect are here, all the songs James always plays on tour, but there are also a couple of surprises, like "Chili Dog" from 1972's One Man Dog, which are quite engaging. Perhaps these tunes are a shade too familiar to sound fresh, but given such lovely readings they certainly sound as comforting as a reunion with an old friend for those listeners who haven't been keeping up with Taylor but might pick this up via its release on Starbucks' HearMusic label. So, this can rope in casual fans who will be quite pleased, but this is different enough from 1993's double-disc Live -- as polished and professional as live albums come -- to make this quite interesting for diehards, too. [One Man Band also contains a two-hour concert DVD.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
DVD Features:
LIVE CONCERT WITH BONUS FOOTAGE & OUTAKES

This new DVD/CD set of live recordings of new performances from one of the iconic singer/songwriter's most popular recordings is interspersed with his insightful and humorous anecdotes on the inspiration for the songs. The DVD includes bonus footage and outtakes.Rolling Stone (p.194) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Taylor's supple baritone remains a wonder of intimacy, and it finds its match in the effortless intricacy of his fingerpicking."
Uncut (p.93) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "[T]his is an effective summary of Taylor's life and work....Taylor's performance throughout is immaculate but full of warmth..."