Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield & Stephen Stills
Supersession

It may seem like a fantasy story, but it really happened this way. It was the summer of '68 when Al Kooper, founder of Blood, Sweat & Tears, planned an ambitious album that sought to reconcile blues, rock, and jazz in a fusion which at the time might have still seemed unlikely, if not impossible. But as I said, it was '68, and the winds of change, experimentation, and even musical freedom were blowing strong. He was already well known in the industry as an arranger and a multi-instrumentalist of high caliber. His Hammond organ had strongly characterized albums like Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde".

Kooper involved Mike Bloomfield, fresh from the Butterfield Blues Band and undoubtedly one of the most talented white blues guitarists known precisely from recordings with Dylan, and with the support of a rhythm section of three elements, they improvised the extraordinary first side of an extraordinary album, with five tracks that came to light, it is said, in a single nine-hour session. Three  tracks are their compositions: among them the beautiful "His Holy Modal Majesty", while the other two are covers, needless to say, reinterpreted in their own way. But fate, as we know, is always lurking, and Bloomfield at this point leaves the company. Sleep problems related to his heroin addiction induce him to leave. Al Kooper's move was successful. He called Stephen Stills, just out of Buffalo Springfield and about to associate his name with David Crosby and Graham Nash in one of the great supergroups in the history of rock (Neil Young came at a later time). But let's not stray from the path. Stills arrives, and a second side equally extraordinary is born. What could have become a strange mishmash of genres and influences was coalescing, allow me the term, into an explosive mix where blues was the fuse, rock the body, jazz the color, psychedelia the contrast, in short, a bomb. I won't make tedious descriptions of tracks that are only to be listened to, but I must point out the Dylan cover "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry" and the Donovan cover "Season Of The Witch".

After "Supersession", Kooper and Bloomfield tried to recreate the magic in a mini-tour that produced a successful double live album but is also remembered for being the first official recording of a young guitarist from San Francisco, a certain Carlos Santana, who a year later would make his name known at Woodstock... but that is another story. In 2003, the album was re-released with 4 bonus tracks, one of which is a live recording, but they add nothing essential to the beauty of the original. I apologize for the verbosity, but I got carried away and so did my ear. Enjoy listening.