Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper - The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper (1997)

Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper is a double album recorded at the Fillmore West venue, the album is the successor to the Super Session studio album, which included both Bloomfield and Kooper in addition to Stephen Stills and achieved commercial and critical success earlier in 1968. The performances, recordings and production are not flawless; in his album notes, Cooper describes the difficulty finding a place to rehearse, Bloomfield's insomnia and the failure of the vocal microphone during "Dear Mr. Fantasy"; The track "I Wonder Who" disappears for no apparent reason during Bloomfield's solo.
Nevertheless, the album remains an important, albeit raw, document of the live blues-rock performance of that period and, apart from its intrinsic qualities, is notable not only for one of Carlos Santana's earliest live recordings, but also for Bloomfield's debut as a vocalist. Although he is not historically noted in this role, in "Don't Throw Your Love on Me So Strong", according to Cooper, "he demonstrates an unsurpassed respect for the traditional compromise between guitar and voice; it is a lesson in phrasing and understanding."
Live Adventures has since been reissued on CD, but without any additional material other than the original release; the concerts lasted three evenings and, according to Cooper, two performances per evening; the result should have been about twelve hours of recording, of which the album is just under ninety minutes. wikipedia.
One of the seminal live albums of the late 60s, Live Adventures of Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield, was a natural, organic offshoot of the hugely successful 1968 Super Session album, which featured both of these pioneering musicians, as well as Stephen Stills. The idea of musical spontaneity, both in live performance and in the recording studio, reached a certain apogee in 1968, when spontaneous performances by musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Steve Winwood and Southern California, which eventually turned into Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, like many others, were indeed a sign of the times. But it is the union of Bloomfield and Cooper that can really claim to be the origin of this phenomenon, and this album takes it to a completely different level.
Using the beautiful and dense rhythm section of John Kahn and Skip Prokop, the two musicians duel with each other in such compositions as the aptly named "Her Holy Modal Highness" and the magnificent, reworked rock/soul composition by Paul Simon "Feelin' Groovy", which is backed by a guest studio vocal recording performed by the author himself. The highlight of the album may have been Bloomfield's rendition of Albert King's epic song "Don't Shave Your Love on Me So Strong", which is arguably also one of the best recordings of his career. As with the Super Session album, history repeated itself, as chronic insomnia overtook Bloomfield by the morning of the second day of the two-day concert, rendering him incapacitated. Cooper enlisted the help of Steve Miller and the virtually unknown Carlos Santana (who is himself a fan of Bloomfield) to record several tracks, in particular, the free version of "Dear Mr. Fantasy", which seems to embody the entire history and era. Undoubtedly, it was necessary for that time, the record was remastered for CD, and the results are truly magnificent and pay tribute to this legendary album.