*** Résumé en anglais seulement ***
DOUBLE CD SET FEATURING 2 SHOWS FROM THE 77 FOREIGN AFFAIRS TOUR By 1976 Tom Waits was drinking heavily and life on the road was starting to take its toll. In reaction to these hardships he recorded Small Change which found him in cynical and pessimistic mood lyrically, on songs such as The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King) and Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell) . With the album, Waits asserted that he "tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have . The album was a critical and commercial success and far outsold any of Waits' previous records. This resulted in a much higher public profile, which brought with it interviews and articles in Time, Newsweek, and Vogue. Waits put together a regular touring band, The Nocturnal Emissions, which featured Frank Vicari on tenor saxophone, Fitzgerald Jenkins on bass guitar, and Chip White on drums and vibraphone. Tom Waits and the Nocturnal Emissions toured the United States and Europe extensively from October 1976 until May 1977. Following the release of Foreign Affairs (1977), musically in a similar vein to Small Change but showing further artistic refinement and exploration into jazz and blues styles, Waits and the Nocturnals went out again to play a handful of gigs in support of the new album in October 77 - four to be precise! Two of these shows are contained on this double CD set. From 10th October at New York s legendary My Fathers Place venue, out on the city s Long Island, comes the first of the two recordings, taken from a superb broadcast of proceedings transmitted across the area by local station WLIR-FM. The second show included is from a couple of weeks later, recorded at the equally famous Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio, and featuring too a performance shared across the locale by way of another FM radio broadcast. Illustrating superbly that by this point in his musical career Tom Waits was nothing if not a consummate professional, despite his troubles and indeed his efforts to, on occasion, cover up his professionalism with fake amateurism, these shows find Tom on superb form and in hilarious mood, performing gigs of pure delight which, as proven here, remain among the best he has ever played.