The Time and the Place, Staged Enthusiasm
A studio session dressed up as a live night, with Art Farmer's quintet doing what it does best.
The Time and the Place was made in 1967 for Columbia, and it has a sleight-of-hand at its center. It was promoted as a live album, but the tracks were recorded in the studio, with an audience added afterward through overdubbing. That detail matters for how you listen. The applause arrives a little early and a little loud, and the room sounds more like a crowd arranged for a record than a crowd that happened to be there.
The music itself is Farmer's quintet playing with no particular fuss. Farmer's flugelhorn has a warm, unhurried sound, and he leans into the ballads and the medium-tempo swingers alike without trying to prove anything. The band is tight and relaxed. Nothing here is a radical statement; it is a working group making the kind of record it could make on a good night.
As a place to enter Farmer's catalog, this is a secondary choice rather than a starting point. Listeners new to him will do better with the more focused studio dates from the same period. But for anyone already familiar with his playing, it offers a pleasant, well-played hour. Ken Dryden of AllMusic called the music first-rate, while noting that the audience tends to applaud prematurely and a bit too loudly. That is a fair summary: the playing holds up, and the staging is the odd part.
