Les McCann Live at the Newport Jazz Festival, Yankee Stadium, New York City, July 8th, 1972.
-Setlist:
1. Band Introduction
2. North Carolina / Comment
3. The Price You Got To Pay To Be Free
4. What's Going On
-Lineup:
Les McCann - keyboards, vocals
David Spinozza - guitar
Jimmy Rowser - bass
Buck Clarke - percussion
Donald Dean - drums

Introduced as "a group of musicians as funky as you have ever heard," keyboardist Les McCann and his crew took to the stage on this Saturday evening somewhere beyond second base on the outfield at Yankee Stadium. This July 8th appearance came shortly after the same unit (sans ubiquitous New York studio session guitarist David Spinozza) had returned from a performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland (not to be confused with McCann's triumphant appearance at Montreux in 1969 which was documented on the live Swiss Movement and yielded the anti-Vietnam protest song "Compared to What").
Opening with a funky jam in E to warm up the stage ("North Carolina," an instrumental track from McCann's current Atlantic album of the time, Talk to the People), they launch into a deluge of distortion-laced clavinet licks by McCann, wah-wah inflected guitar lines by Spinozza and bubbling electric bass from Jimmy Rowser, with a touch of tambourine from Buck Clarke and a slamming backbeat laid down by Donald Dean (who had played drums on "Compared to What" at Montreux three years earlier). Clavinet was THE sound of 1972 and McCann was one of the preeminent practitioners of that funky new keyboard, along with Stevie Wonder (who released his clavinet-laden "Superstition" in October of that year) and Billy Preston (who added to the clavinet vocabulary with his 1972 hit single, "Outa-Space"). At the peak of this raunchy funk jam, McCann abruptly stops the band cold to croon a few bars of "Comment," a song composed by Yusuf Rahman and Charles Wright (and the title track to McCann's 1970 Atlantic album), accompanying himself on gentle Fender Rhodes electric piano chords. McCann's soulful voice rings out through the House That Ruth Built as he delivers the message of love and universal brotherhood: "If all men are truly brothers, why can't we love one another? Love and peace from ocean to ocean, somebody please second my motion. If all men are born to be free, what about you and what about me?"
The band jumps back into the funk on "The Price You Got To Pay To Be Free," another socially relevant number in the vein of "Compared to What" written by Nat Adderley Jr., 16-year-old son of the famous jazz cornetist and member of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Spinozza, who appeared on countless albums during the early '70s by a wide variety of artists ranging from pop stars like Paul Simon, Don McLean, Paul McCartney, Roberta Flack, Bette Midler and John Lennon & Yoko Ono to jazz musicians like Buddy Rich, Oliver Nelson, Grover Washington Jr. and Lou Donaldson, digs in on this vamp and delivers some searing guitar work. Near the end of this rhythmically charged number, McCann issues the plea "How much longer will it be?" before launching into a few verses of the moving hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing," a tune widely regarded in the African-American community as "the black national anthem." McCann and company close out this Newport Jazz Festival set with a soulful, slow-grooving rendition of "What's Going On," Marvin Gaye's anthemic, socially conscious masterpiece which had been released to universal acclaim the previous year.
(Milkowski).