Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979

Field Commander Cohen gathers performances from Leonard Cohen's late-1979 European tour, taped mainly across three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in London with a further date at Brighton's Dome, in support of that year's Recent Songs. Cohen was travelling with the six-piece band billed as Passenger, whose blend of oud, violin, jazz-inflected guitar and keyboards gave these versions of his songs a looser, more worldly cast than the austere arrangements of his early studio albums. The set draws across his catalogue to that point, pairing newer material such as “The Gypsy's Wife” and “The Guests” with reworked staples like “Bird on the Wire,” “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye.” Cohen's voice, by this stage deeper and more weathered than on his 1960s recordings, is frequently singled out by critics as a highlight of these performances, lending the songs a gravity his earlier readings lacked. The album sat unreleased for two decades before Columbia issued it as part of a wave of archival live material from Cohen's catalogue around the turn of the millennium. It has since been received as one of the stronger documents of Cohen as a live performer, valued for showing an artist still restlessly reinterpreting his own songbook a decade into his recording career.