Songs from and for the road. You like to drive? If you answer that question in the affirmative, two legends can lend you a hand on your sound system, although in truth it really doesn't matter whether you're sitting in a car or trying to keep your balance in the Metro. Along with the major releases of this unusually warm January -at least in this part of the world-, some choice re-issues have appeared, like Seven Moons Live on the relatively recent Songs from the Road collection from 2009. That performance features two guitar legends in Jack Bruce and Robin Trower joining forces with one of the best drummers of that period and today, Gary Husband, currently with John McLaughlin.



The 2015 re-issue demands its spot on our Jukebox by virtue of arriving with a DVD of the concert filmed in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) in February few years ago, during the brief European tour promoting Seven Moons. Truthfully, it's the live version of that disc that really interests us, and from the past only a memorable Sunshine of Your Love and another jewel in White Room, with Trower doing the honours for Eric Clapton on both tracks. Not to mention Husband evoking Ginger Baker.

And for Guitar’s Exchange....this is a loaded double shot of bass and guitar. Neither one needs any sort of historical introduction. They are History. They began to write it with Cream and Procol Harum in the first Ice Age of rock, two dinosaurs who survived the extinction of their species and were capable of joining forces in the 21st century to give us one final lesson in Rhythm & Blues. Bruce unfortunately died of a liver ailment in March, 2014.



In a disc that conceptually was a work of the tireless Jack Bruce, Robin Trower's role was to provide the splendour of his inseparable, personalised Stratocaster - his Fender signature model. At 71 years old, he shows his guitar playing is fine form, nimbly responding to changes in the music. And Jack Bruce, two years Trower's senior, doesn't make it easy on him playing his no less exclusive Warwick signature bass.

A powerful bass and a guitar without 'additives'. In spite of the tremendous span in time, the trio that walked onstage at Nijmegen managed to recreate for an unrepeatable instant the hypnotic atmosphere loaded with the smoke and smell of marijuana of the '70s, something impossible in our antiseptic clubs today. And without smoke and a bar to lean up against, maybe we'll live longer, but the blues will never “taste” the same.