Art & Paul down by the schoolyard

I'm still gnawing on the most recent Off the Shelf selection (it's a chewy one), so I don't have that worked out yet.  But, I did visit a local thrift store yesterday and picked up a few good music CDs.  Among them: Miles Davis & Quincy Jones Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival (one of Davis' final performances before his death), a couple of Count Basie albums (including a reissue of the April in Paris album and a collection of Neal Hefti arrangements performed by the Basie band), and the Simon & Garfunkel Central Park Concert.

Officially titled The Concert in Central Park, the recording is the first live album from the folk-rock duo.  The concert took place in Central Park, New York City on September 19, 1981.  Over 500,000 people were in attendance and the proceeds from the concert went towards improvement of the park.  Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had been friends since they were kids and were a big part of the music scene and environment of the 1960s, channeling the turbulent emotions of that time in American history.  They admit to being influenced by the Everly Brothers, as evidenced by the close-harmony vocal style and folk tendencies.

After some disagreements about which way they should go artistically, they officially broke up as a duo in 1970.  Paul Simon went on to have a very successful solo career (he is the songwriting powerhouse between them).  Art Garfunkel wanted to pursue work in acting.  Their final duo album was Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Of course, Paul Simon is talented and interesting, but after doing a bit of research on Art Garfunkel, it's possible to see why these two musicians could have had artistic disagreements.  They are radically unique people.  Garfunkel is known to be a voracious reader: on his website you can find a list of every book he's read since 1968.  He also writes poetry and has walked across America several times between 1983 and 1997.  Simon is completely focused on his music career.

The Central Park concert was a reunion of sorts.  The concert was a success and they did a world tour 1982-83.  The subsequent album, to be released as a duo work, was scrapped and reworked by Simon, who released it as a solo album.  The two didn't speak for a while after that.  There was a lot of troubled water, apparently, and the bridge had been hacked to bits.

In 2003, they performed The Sound of Silence to open the Grammy Awards.  They also accepted the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.  They still occasionally perform together, most recently at the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 2010.

The Central Park concert still sounds pretty good to me.