By Reviewed by Bruce Elder
JEFF BUCKLEY (Sony)
How does anyone measure greatness in popular music? Great voice? Great songs? Commercial success? One measure, which transcends these considerations, is the rare ability to perform the same songs, night after night, with such emotional conviction and honesty that it not only sounds as though they are singing everything for the first time but that there seems to be no filter between the voice and the song; pure music directly from the emotional centre of the singer.
You can fudge it (Frank Sinatra), ignore it (any winner of Australian Idol ), occasionally stumble upon it (the Rolling Stones) or, in the case of Jeff Buckley, expose your heart and soul every night so that audiences surrender to your honesty and vulnerability.
The death of Buckley (he drowned in the Wolf River in Tennessee in 1997, aged 30) after he had released only one album - Grace - was a loss similar in importance to the suicide of Nick Drake in 1974. It was not a question of unrealised potential. It was the loss of a very major talent. Both singers, with only a small body of work, had shown the immense power of emotional honesty in popular song.
Not surprisingly, in Buckley's case, the record company, recognising an unfulfilled (and now unfulfillable) demand for the singer-songwriter's work, has spent the past 12 years searching the vaults and releasing every possible artefact.
Buckley's unfinished second album, Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk , was released in 1998. Live At Sin-E , a four-track EP first released in 1993, was re-released in 2003. Live in Chicago , recorded in 1995, was released as a DVD in 2000. Mystery White Boy , a CD of live recordings, was released in 2000. So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley , a "best of" compilation, was released in 2007. Numerous bootlegs have appeared and Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah , widely recognised as the definitive version, went to No. 1 on the US iTunes charts in 2008 and got to No. 2 in the British charts that year.
Now we have Grace Around The World , a CD and DVD "celebrating the 15th anniversary of Grace ", which proudly boasts, with a rather excessive use of capitals: "For the First Time Ever Experience GRACE through Previously Unreleased Live Performances." This means the CD-DVD package contains a full performance of all but one of the songs on Grace , gleaned from seven performances. It comes as both a DVD (16 tracks, including interviews, lasting more than two hours) and a more focused CD with 12 tracks lasting 76 minutes. As the original album only had 10 tracks, and no one seems to be able to find a live version of Buckley singing Benjamin Britten's Corpus Christi Carol , it includes two versions of Grace and So Real and an excellent version of the unrecorded Buckley composition What Will You Say .
If you never saw Buckley perform live and you want to understand why everyone who did still speaks with ill-disguised adoration, then this is about as close as you will get. The experience is unforgettable.
© 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
