Elliott Smith - Club Congo, Scottsdale, AZ, 1-12-1995

I'm excited to post this album, because it suggests a whole new way to improve sound quality using the powers of new audio editing programs. This is very interesting concert from early in Elliott Smith's solo career. It was recorded surprisingly well, considering it was just taped by someone in the audience. But there was a lot of talking from the audience all through the songs. There was so much that at one point Smith complained about it, asking why so many people would pay to attend a concert and then just talk.

I recently discovered a audio editing program called MVSEP. That stands for "Music and Voice Separation." It has lots of options, and one option I haven't seen with other programs is separating crowd noise from the rest of the music. It's not perfect and doesn't work all of the time, but it does a great job the vast majority of the time. I've been using it a lot on the albums I posted here, for instance removing crowd noise on live tracks that are mixed in with lots of studio tracks. 

So I tried it for this concert. Boy, did it work well! The recording went from a pretty good sounding audience bootleg to soundboard quality. There are very few Elliott Smith soundboards, and this sounds just as good as most of those. I removed nearly all of the crowd noise during the songs (with a couple of brief exceptions), but I kept the applause at the ends of songs the same. Then, during the banter between songs, I increased the volume of Smith's voice and lowered the volume of the audience talking.

As for the music, at this point in his career, Smith had been in the band Heatmiser, but he's only released one solo album in his new, more acoustic style, "Roman Candle," in 1994. This concert is just him in solo acoustic mode. There's only one other concert recording from this early part of his career with this level of sound quality, which was from Portland, Oregon, in September 1994. I would have posted that here, except it's been released in whole as part of a 25th anniversary edition of his 1995 album "Elliott Smith." 

I'd say this one now sounds as good as that one, but most of the songs are different. Only three were played at both: "Some Song," "Condor Ave.," and "No Confidence Man." For this concert, he also played one cover song, "Little Maggie." 

By the way, different dates have been posted for this concert, with most of them claiming December 1, 1994. But the person who taped it recently confirmed it took place on this date, January 12, 1995. 

Like the concert in Portland I mentioned, this one is pretty short, because Smith was only an opening act at the time. Furthermore, the crowd sounds quite small. I'm guessing only a few dozen people were there. So it's great to have another recording of this quality when he was so unknown.

This album is 36 minutes long.

If anyone knows of concert bootlegs that sound great but for lots of crowd noise during the songs, please let me know. I might be able to fix it using this new technique.

01 talk (Elliott Smith)
02 Some Song (Elliott Smith)
03 talk (Elliott Smith)
04 Single File (Elliott Smith)
05 talk (Elliott Smith)
06 No Confidence Man (Elliott Smith)
07 talk (Elliott Smith)
08 Little Maggie (Elliott Smith)
09 talk (Elliott Smith)
10 Needle in the Hay (Elliott Smith)
11 talk (Elliott Smith)
12 Antonio Carlos Jobim (Elliott Smith)
13 talk (Elliott Smith)
14 Last Call (Elliott Smith)
15 talk (Elliott Smith)
16 Condor Ave. (Elliott Smith)
17 talk (Elliott Smith)
18 Clementine (Elliott Smith)
19 talk (Elliott Smith)
20 Roman Candle (Elliott Smith)
21 talk (Elliott Smith)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16224781/ELLITTSMTH1995_ClbCngoScttsdleAZ__1-12-1995_atse.zip.html

I'm not entirely sure, but I think the cover photo is from 1997. I don't know any more about it.