Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello in 1998
YEARS ON AIR: 1997-1999
HOST: Chris Douridas (season one), David Byrne (season two), John Hiatt (season three)
Taking its name from the Manhattan street that is home to Sony Music Studios, Sessions was a state-of-the-art performance platform for some of the leading acts in rock, blues, jazz, and country. The show boasted high production values, using six cameras and a largely forgotten three-overhead-mic configuration used many years earlier to record classical music. Even today, episodes of the PBS show (on DVD and CD) are widely praised for the quality of the audio recordings.
NOTABLE GUESTS: Daniel Lanois, Suzanne Vega, Richard Thompson, Ben Folds Five, Emmylou Harris, Liz Phair, and David Byrne (below, doing an appropriately disturbing version of “Psycho Killer”)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5fT7k4jvSg]