My Pianoman
There are numerous Youtube videos with live performances of Ekseption and Trace. Yet a live album had never been released. So, it was really fun to notice that in 2003 a real Ekseption live album came out, of course with the old classics, and enhanced with the fizz and gin of a real audience.
The pleasant thing of live recordings is that the performance often differs from the album version and is more fresh and spontaneous at times. That is quite apparent from this recording. What is obvious too: Keyboard technology has advanced since Rick van der Linden started on his old Hammond B3. In the last century, you needed an extra pair of hands and a Mellotron to add some strings, but now it’s all integrated in one preset on the keyboard.
In the end this album would turn out to be one of the last live albums by Rick, released three years before his passing away.