New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony
Music Entertainment, are pleased to announce the digital and CD release of the long-awaited
Barbra Streisand - Live At The Bon Soir on Friday, November 4th.
With new mixes supervised by Barbra and Grammy Award-winning engineer Jochem van der Saag, listeners are able to experience what it was like to witness 20-year old Streisand at the dawn of her unparalleled career. Recorded in a tiny Greenwich Village nightclub on November 4, 5 and 6, 1962 (just weeks after Streisand inked her first record deal with Columbia on October 1), Live At The Bon Soir was originally intended to be Barbra's debut album for the label.
The tapes for Live At The Bon Soir were eventually shelved in favour of 1963's The
Barbra Streisand Album (which offered studio versions of 11 songs from Barbra's nightclub repertoire). That groundbreaking album took home several Grammys including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal Performance.
With the release of
Barbra Streisand - Live At The Bon Soir, her first album since 2021's Release Me 2 (a career-spanning compilation of rare and previously unreleased recordings), Columbia Records celebrates Barbra Streisand's 60th anniversary with the label. She is the only artist--solo or group--to have charted #1 albums across six consecutive decades (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s).
2022 marks the 60th anniversary of her legendary appearances at the famed Greenwich Village haunt, The Bon Soir. For the first time,
Barbra Streisand - Live At The Bon Soir includes 24 tracks that have been produced, mixed and approved by
Barbra Streisand and released in their entirety as an album. All of the original master tapes are from Barbra's personal vault.
Barbra Streisand - Live At The Bon Soir was produced by Barbra Streisand,
Martin Erlichman and Jay Landers. In Landers extensive liner notes (which also include song-by-song descriptions of the album's 24 tracks), he remarks, "The science of recording has made quantum leaps since 1962. Grammy Award-winning engineer, Jochem van der Saag, has subtly solved audio issues in ways his predecessors could hardly have fathomed. Absolutely nothing about Barbra's sterling vocals has been altered. However, the overall sonic picture has been greatly improved from the original tapes."
According to van der Saag, "The moment we played the tapes through modern state-of-the-art speakers, it was clear what the original engineers, Roy Halee and Ad "Pappy" Theroux, had faced. The club's acoustics were obviously not designed for recording, and there was a lot of leakage from the instruments into her vocal mic. If we wanted to lower the volume of the piano for example, the vocal volume would decrease, too. To give listeners 'the best seat in the house,' we used cutting-edge spectral editing technology, clarifying the true artistry of Barbra and her band."
