Ach du lieber! Uff da! Oy gevalt! Here I thought Universal Congress Of's studio albums were good; this live album is taking me down like a boxing kangaroo. I had previously thought that Joe Baiza was not that spectacular a guitarist, but there's some serious guitar dust-up happening on this record, to say nothing of the rest of the band. I can't figure out why a band with as much cohesion and moxie and grit could operate in such abject obscurity, as UCO did for all of its career. But the fact that they existed for so many years virtually unnoticed in the US serves to explain why they chose to record a live album in Germany, where the audiences (judging from what you can hear on this record) seem really blown away by this band, rightfully so. The style is pretty much straight-ahead hard bop jazz with a good deal of focus on the sax player, who seems to be able to draw from an unlimited source of breath and who never seems to run out of inspiration to go off. The drummer (who composed a few of the songs also) is a pretty hard hitter, nothing like the softer stylings you hear on 50s and 60s jazz records, where guys mostly just used the ride cymbal. On a side note: I think was on this tour where Joe Baiza got attacked by skinheads. Something about German skinheads hating Turks and they thought Joe was Turkish (he's Latino) and they attacked him with a baseball bat and shattered most of the bones in his hand.