Shawn Phillips - Ivanhoe Theater, Chicago March 31, 1977 (Remastered, Live On Broadcasting) '2025

Tracks list

	Tracklist:

1. Moonshine (Live) (06:21)
2. Ballad of Casey Deiss (Live) (07:34)
3. Serendipity Peace (Live) (03:46)
4. For Her>what's Happenin' Jim (Live) (06:37)
5. Today (Live) (06:54)
6. Early Morning Hours (Live) (05:49)
7. May God Be with You (Live) (01:36)
8. Memoirs for Jh (Live) (06:12)
9. Hey Joe (Live) (01:44)


 morePhillips was born in 1943 in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of best-selling
spy novelist Philip Atlee, who moved the family around the world at various
times, including to the South Pacific. After hearing "Malaguena" on the piano,
he took up the guitar at age seven, and by the time he was 12, he was playing
the chords to Carl Perkins songs. Phillips' musical experience transcended rock
& roll, however. In the course of his family's travels, he got to live in almost
every corner of the globe, including Tahiti, and absorbed the music that
surrounded him wherever he was living. He returned to Texas in his teens, with
some training in classical music but a love for performers like Jimmy Reed and
Ike & Tina Turner, among other blues and R&B artists. He did a hitch in the
Navy, and then went back to Texas before retreating to California, where he
played around the early-'60s folk circuit.

Phillips made his first record, an over-produced single of Bob Gibson's version
of "Frankie and Johnnie," for Columbia, which he followed with two albums, I'm a
Loner and Shawn, neither of which was successful. Phillips went to England,
where he performed and wrote songs with Donovan, in a professional relationship
somewhat clouded in controversy. (Phillips claimed in interviews during the '70s
that he co-wrote "Season of the Witch," as well as a major portion of the songs
that finally surfaced on the album Sunshine Superman, but only ever received one
co-author credit for "Little Tin Soldier" on the Fairytale album.) While staying
in England, the range of his work vastly expanded, partly with the help of
various controlled substances.

He was ejected from England for playing without a work permit and tried living
in Paris before he headed for Italy. He settled in Positano, a tiny fishing
village. By the late '60s, Phillips' musical expertise had broadened to include
not only different kinds of guitars, but also the Indian sitar. After a few
years of trying, he recognized that he'd started too late and would never master
the sitar in the traditional manner, and instead began learning to make his own
music on the instrument.

In 1968, he went to London with the idea for a trilogy of albums and recorded a
major portion of it in collaboration with Traffic members Steve Winwood, Chris
Wood, and Jim Capaldi. No record company was willing to commit to such an
ambitious body of work by an unknown artist, and the material languished for
more than two years until Phillips came to A&M Records. Producer Jonathon Weston
listened to his work and decided to try and release an edited version of the
music.

This became his A&M debut album Contribution, which ranged freely between
uptempo folk-rock ("Man Hole Covered Wagon") to introspective quasi-classical
guitar pieces ("L Ballade") and works mixing sitar and acoustic guitar
("Withered Roses"). The album got positive reviews, but it was when Phillips
embarked on his first U.S. tour, in conjunction with his next album, Second
Contribution, late in 1971, that he was discovered by the press. Critics in the
New York Times and other publications displayed unbridled awe at Phillips'
prowess on a range of instruments, including electric and acoustic six- and
12-string guitars and the sitar, and his singing range, a full three octaves
from baritone to counter-tenor, as well as his songwriting. He was one of the
few singer/songwriters to play double-necked six- and 12-string guitars (a
standard feature of progressive and metal bands) on-stage, in intimate locales
such as New York's Bottom Line, and to test the full range of the hybrid
instrument.

Writers lavished praise on Phillips for his unusual lyrics, haunting melodies,
daunting musicianship, and the ambition of his records. He was a complete
enigma, American-born but raised internationally, with a foreigner's keen
appreciation for all the music of his homeland and a seasoned traveler's love of
world music, with none of the usual limits on his thinking about music. He slid
between jazz, folk, pop, and classical sounds -- it was nothing for Phillips to
segue from a progressive-style mood song with a 50-piece orchestra into an
R&B-based number driven by his electric guitar, and back again. "The Ballad of
Casey Deiss," from Second Contribution, was a case in point, a song about a
friend who died when he was struck by lightning, scored for acoustic guitars,
electric guitars, vibraphone, and the horn section of a full orchestra, as well
as multi-layered vocals.

A third album, Collaboration, followed, along with another tour, and then came
Faces, Bright White, and Furthermore. His collaborator was conductor/arranger
Paul Buckmaster, the man responsible for the choral accompaniment on the Rolling
Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and several other
rock-meets-classical touchstones including Elton John's first four albums. On
tour, Phillips was booked into clubs with artists such as comedian Albert
Brooks, singer/songwriter Wendy Waldman, and Seals & Crofts, and usually worked
solo, surrounded by a half-dozen guitars, or sometimes with a single
accompanist, Peter Robinson, on keyboards.

Phillips never achieved major stardom, despite his critical accolades. He never
courted an obvious commercial sound, preferring to write songs that, as he put
it, "make you feel different from the way you felt before you started
listening," primarily love songs and sonic landscapes. But his experiments with
electronic keyboards on his albums from the mid- and late '70s made him a
jazz-funk pioneer as well -- though that, like many of his musical innovations,
wasn't generally recognized until somewhat later.

He made nine albums for A&M before moving on to RCA in 1978 for Transcendence,
which mixed his guitars with a 60-piece symphony orchestra and members of Herbie
Hancock's band, produced in collaboration with arranger/conductor Michael Kamen.
He also contributed to movie music by Manos Hadjidakis and appeared in the movie
Run with the Wind. In 1983, he recorded Beyond Here Be Dragons, an ambitious set
with producer Michael Hoenig, bassist Alphonso Johnson, guitarist Caleb Quaye,
keyboardist J. Peter Robinson, and Ralph Humphrey on drums. It remained
unreleased for five years. Chameleon issued it in 1988 to the delight of fans.

With close to 20 albums behind him since the mid-'60s, Phillips has a following
in America, Europe, and Japan, and he has performed at different world music
festivals. A cult figure whose peers include Van Dyke Parks and, perhaps,
Leonard Cohen (though Cohen's public profile was enhanced by his following as an
established poet and author in the literary community), he remains an enigmatic
figure on the music landscape. His work remained sufficiently in demand in the
'90s, however, to justify a best-of compilation from A&M in 1992 that included
notes by Phillips and one new song. In 1995, Polygram South Africa issued the
anthology Another Contribution.

Phillips had become a fireman and emergency medical technician in Texas. In 1994
a brand-new studio date, The Truth If It Kills, produced by Michel Le Francois
was issued by Imagine in Canada. In 1998, Wounded Bird re-released eight new
classic albums from his catalog.

Phillips, who'd moved to South Africa in 2000 and worked as a paramedic with the
National Sea Rescue Institute, claimed in interview that he was pretty much out
of music completely between 1994 and 2003. Nonetheless, No Category was issued
by Universal that year. It compiled new and unreleased music alongside
previously issued songs. A boxed set from Gott Discs paired Contribution and
Second Contribution in 2004, and his catalog titles slowly began reappearing
from various labels. On June 6, 2006 the Nashville Symphony Orchestra performed
the suite Disturbing Horizons: Events in the Life of a Prince comprised of nine
Phillips' pieces.

The two-disc Living Contribution: Live at Kirstenbosch Gardens was released by
South Africa's Feet Music in 2007. In 2009, Hux released the long-sought-after
Live at the BBC from a 1973 appearance, and in 2011, 1972's Faces saw
re-release. In 2013, Rumplestiltskin's Resolve (originally issued in 1976)
appeared from Talking Elephant, and a year later Varese Sarabande released
Infinity, a set of unreleased material from 1989. The 20-track double-disc
Perspective, contains songs written and recorded since the 2000s (mostly in
South Africa). It was issued in 2015 by Talking Elephant and was followed by a
2016 reissue of 1978's Transcendence. © Bruce Eder



Shawn Phillips - Ivanhoe Theater, Chicago March 31, 1977.rar -  254.6 MB

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