FIRST TIME HEARING Renaissance- "Ashes Are Burning" (Reaction) 

A rich creation of atmosphere, story and genres!! Thanks for watching! 🔥🥰🔥

The live version of this song is even better. It has an awesome extended bass solo in the middle that is beyond great.

Today is Annie Haslam's birthday, and she talks with reactors once in a while. They do no bad music, and most of it is great. Play all of them!

Could listen to Annie Haslam anytime anywhere. They have a masterpiece epic song called Scheherazde and one of the best live progs of all time called Renaissance Live at Carnege Hall. Annie is beyond compare.

Renaissance was one of the underrated band at the 70s. I love them since as was 13. Now I'm 62 and I still love them.

A band with a lead bass and piano, acoustic rhythm guitar, jazz drummer and an operatic vocalist. No one quite like them.

Yes, they're prog, Annie Haslam singing is the primary draw, the best female vocalist in prog(IMHO). Good music too, no duds. Great bass always, courtesy of Jon Camp

Renaissance 'The Vulture fly high" and "A trip to the fair" are also fantastic songs. Also "Scheherazade".

Never heard this before....Dreamy and Outstanding!!!!!!! ♥🎼🎹🎸🥁🎤🎶🎶

Listen to the live version of this Carnegie Hall or Royal Albert Hall, where Annie replaces the guitar and shows her full range

Let us not forget the late and extraordinary Mr. Tout on the keyboards, whose contributions were enormous to the entire band - to it's overall sound. People say that Renaissance sounds so Classical. Doubtless, and he must have had a lot to do with that. Certainly, the voice of an angel helps, too. Great band! By the way, what a great review! Impressive.

Early Renaissance especially has pastoral elements much like early Genesis. Don’t skip out on their earliest albums, before Annie joined. Different, but also good. Jon Camp, the bassist, is a real beast.

Oh my gosh you got to Renaissance,one of my top ten favorite bands

AWESOME. One of the best extended song outros. Annie's voice is just as Awesome live. A hidden gem for sure. Saw them in the 70's and in recent years since Annie lives in my area here in the States. Check out Black Flame and Ocean Gypsy just to name 2 of many. Peace.

Saw them live at Red Rocks under the stars in their peak. Amazing and magical night! When Annie hits "Ashes are burning the way" and that bass comes in...goosebumps!

Thank you for this one...Renaissance was one of a kind in those days....Annie Haslam has a voice like fine crystal. Here's their epic track from 1976 that introduced me to this incredible band - "Can You Hear Me" - symphonic rock before it was called that: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-LdWA7l1FGcQ.html

Renaissance live in a small club was amazing! Annie Haslam’s voice is incredible!

I'm late to this party. Annie is still performing today. Can't quite sing as well as she did, but she's still got it. Lots of new stuff available on YT. The Live In Carengie Hall ending of this song is EPIC!!

Yet another band I loved, you must listen to “ Mother Russia” that was my fav Renaissance track, used to play it all the time where I was at the time in 1977 ❤️😌

I am currently going through the 'Renaissance' discography and man did this band won my heart immediately. One of the best bands i've never heard from. I would recommend everything on the albums 'Scheherazade and Other Stories', 'Novella', 'Turn of the Cards', 'Ashes Are Burning', 'Prologue'. 'Islands' on the first album is also incredible. I haven't heard ONE bad song from them, i think i love this band.

Another great choice, Brandon. Renaissance is fantastic, and right up your alley with the orchestration. I agree with others that Song of Scheherazade is a must, particularly the Live At Carnegie Hall version, to see how they could pull it off live, and how real Annie’s voice is. Other great tunes of theirs are Ocean Gypsy, Can You Understand, Song For All Seasons. My favourite is The Flood At Lyons, though it was an album where they were denied an orchestra; still pretty good though. Enjoy your Renaissance journey!

You have just dipped your toes in the vast 9cean of Renaissance's music. But what a great place to start. Ashes has for omany decades been the8ir closing song at their concerts. The live version lasting as long as 26 minutes. . Their Lifecat Carnegie Hall album features that. Please continue to list their music. You will enjoy this musical journey. 12:59

John Tout 's mastery of the keyboards rivals any of the more famous names of the era (Keith Emerson, Jon Lord, etc.). There are some truly incredible tracks to experience. Here's another, a paean to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's struggles - "Mother Russia" - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0Yf2_m1qzaY.html

Thank you so much for this. No one reacts to Renaissance and i’m grateful. My parents used to listen to this when I was little and I still do to this day. Florence and the Machine voice of 70’s. Ver emotional. Mother Russia is another amazing and powerful tune. Thanks again. 🙏🏻

Missed you doing this fabulous song by one of the great progressive bands. Annie incomparable as a singer. This band were the equal of their great prog peers.

some other songs you may like Can you understand, Kalydra, Winter tree, Jon camp is playing a rickenbacker 4001 bass it has a unique sound he is also background vocals

Thanks for reacting to this! Every second of this song is incredible, piano, lead vocals, chorus vocals, base guitar and lead guitar at the end by the visiting Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash

John Hawken participated in the founding of RENAISSANCE. He will leave the band before the album "Ashes Are Burning" (1973) to become the keyboardist, among others, of... STRAWBS, which band will accompany SUPERTRAMP in their tour of 1974. Thank you.

Been a fan of Renaissance for a very long time. Always thought that they were the perfect blend of rock, jazz and classical music. Good job as always with your reaction comments.

I just now remembered another favorite song by Renaissance - Jekyll and Hyde

You've just started down a rabbit hole that you won't want to come out of! Amazing group, and singer Annie Haslam. Talented and energetic youngsters back then. I saw them in Seattle. Wow! In a very ornate opera house. It blew my mind! I like 'Thinking about things I don't understand', 'Day of the Dreamer', 'Rajah Khan', so many more...

Awesome reaction, Brandon. Renaissance are unique even with the prog scene. Annie has an amazing range. She hardly scratches it here.

Another great new artist introduction! I’ve liked Renaissance for many years. And yes Brandon I did see them back in 2016. 😮 Annie is phenomenal live with her soaring vocals, she has a five octave range. A couple of other great songs are “Carpet of the Sun”, “Midas Man” or the long epic “Scheherazade “. Between Annie’s vocals and the great musicianship, Renaissance delivers great classic prog.

Check out Scheherazade by Renaissance! Especially the live version from Carnegie Hall. Matter of fact there's a live version of Ashes are Burning on that same album! Enjoy!

In case no-one's mentioned it, the lyrics were inspired by a near-death experience. Also the melody for the "burning embers" section is a bit of a rip from Mothers by Albert Ayler.

A simply superb band, who married prog with orchestral brilliantly, and threw in some English pastoral tones, serious rock and sometimes jazz chops, an outstanding voice, and very unusual lyrics, courtesy of poet Betty Thatcher. Annie Haslam's singing has a quite extraordinary, bell-like clarity, and when she does her vocal solos, she sounds positively unearthly. Very little vibrato though, to my ears!

They released a compilation in the 90s (2 CDs). Not one bad song. Great for those long car trips. That was my introduction to the band...how did I not discover them even earlier??

I had a major crush on Annie Haslam as a teenager. She looked and sounded like an angel. Their 1976 Carnegie Hall concerts with full orchestra are classics. That’s a great album too. No band quite like them in Prog rock although the Moody Blues did pioneer orchestration so I guess there’s that connection. Excellent reaction and analysis Brandon.

One of the best bands ever, with a lot of wonderful symphonic progressive songs and albuns, and with a sublime lead singer. So sublime that sometimes on some live recordings she surpasses studio ones in vocal performance. An interesting thing specifically about this song ("Ashes Are Burning") is that the closing guitar solo was played by Andy Powell, guitarist of Wishbone Ash, as Renaissance didn't usually use electric guitars in their songs, only acoustic guitars. And in that same period (1972-1973) the band's keyboardist, John Tout, also made a special appearance playing the organ in "Throw Down The Sword", the closing song of the magnificent album "Argus" by Wishbone Ash, that is, basically a partnership between these 2 musicians from the 2 bands in the closing songs of the two albums.

They have so many stories told with song and great sounds!

Live at Carnegie Hall (Renaissance album) I play quite often . Ocean Gypsy , Mother Russia, Song of Scheherazade and Ashes are Burning , all outstanding. Yeah the history of the band is quite an interesting read all by itself.. Along with Curved Air who I rate as well in this prog female vocal style they were the best.

Brandon: Excellent choice selecting Renaissance! They were very popular in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The crystal clear voice of Annie Haslam was always a favorite. The other woman with a crystal clear voice was Karen Carpenter. Of all the many concerts I attended, the only groups I saw 3 times were Renaissance and Genesis. Now that you are going down the Renaissance rabbit hole you will be floored by Song Of Scheherazade(Yes, I know it is another 20 minute song like Tarkus, but well worth it). Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash finished Ashes Are Burning with his great guitar solo. Perhaps you can visit Wishbone Ash, one of the first groups to use dual lead guitars! Great reaction!

Never heard anything by this band before, although I’ve heard the name. Obviously….prog with a big dollop of traditional British folk music. The female vocalist has a voice timbre that would be very much at home in Fairport Convention or Pentangle. Very pleasing sound and solid musicianship. A new discovery for me. Thanks!

I loved the surprise! Well, now you know that there are voices and there is Annie Haslam. Quite a few great female singers have her five full octaves, but very, very few with the same stability and the same overall timbre as she does. She recently gave an interview to Doug Helvering ("Classical Composer Reacts...") and said that she never thought of singing until her mid-20s. Then she went to a bar with a "talent show" (we'd call it a karaoke today) and people were impressed with her voice and said she should explore it. She didn't give it a second thought and forgot it until she needed to supplement her meager income with her dull day job and thought that singing at night could be a possibility. She found a good vocal coach (extraordinarily good, I'd say!) and was trained for NINE MONTHS! That was ALL her formal training! She was a rare flawless natural diamond that required very little cutting and polishing to become a stunning gem! Then she replied to a newspaper ad looking for a singer. It was a band that had taken over the rights for the name Renaissance from another unrelated incarnation (I've listened to their only record, it wasn't bad but not remarkable either), and the rest is history. Luckily, the other band members were all awesome musicians, and all classically trained. (They made their own versions of several famous classical works: "Rajah Khan" is Ravel's "Bolero" with an interesting Middle Eastern tinge, the very sad but incredibly beautiful "At the Harbour" uses Debussy's "The Sunken Cathedral" in the intro and outro, "Cold Is Being" is Albinoni's "Adagio", and so on.) Lyrics were usually written by their friend Betty Thatcher (no relation to the abominable Margaret), who appears to have been one of those die-hard hippies, because her style is totally "flower power", and that was already passé in the 1970s (even teenage me already grinned at lines like "it's peaceful revolution time to join the day now" in "On the Frontier"), but that didn't mar the brilliance of their work. As you could see, Annie is extraordinary, but so were her bandmates. Their golden age goes from 1973, with "Ashes Are Burning", going through "Turn of the Cards" (1974), the stunning "Live at Carnegie Hall" double album and the magnificent "Scheherazade and Other Stories" (1975), to "Novella" in 1977. They were already feeling tired in "A Song for All Seasons" (1978, even though "Day of the Dreamer" contains one of the most beautiful sections they ever recorded --- you'll know it if and when you listen to it) and I only liked ONE song ("Kalynda") from "Azure d'Or" (1979). After that, Tout and Sullivan dropped out, they hired replacements and recorded two forgettable pop-ish albums before disbanding for good. (The current "Renaissance" is just Annie's accompanying ensemble and not really the true band.) Annie moved to the U.S. (Pennsylvannia near Philly, where you're most likely to see her performing), had (and still has) a fairly successful solo career, and the others faded into obscurity. Recommendations? So many!!! Let's do it chronologically by album release date: the entire "Ashes Are Burning" album is enjoyable, but I highlight "Can You Understand?" (as impressive as the title song, if not more!), "Carpet of the Sun" (a short "up" song that's the first thing many associate with Renaissance), "On the Frontier" (I wouldn't give it an epic platinum award, but I know you love good outros, and this has a masterful one with a tense duel between the drums and the piano), and the already mentioned "At the Harbour" (careful, there is a shortened version that omits the amazing Debussy part at the beginning and end). From "Turn of the Cards", "Running Hard" and "Mother Russia". "Scheherazade" requires a deep breath just to talk about it... Sigh. The long eponymous suite that took up the entire side 2 of the LP is an absolute masterpiece and well worth the time. It's so rich and delicate, Annie is magnificent as usual but the orchestral arrangements are so beautiful that for perhaps the only time obfuscate her. And "Ocean Gypsy" is one of my all-time favorite Renaissance songs. "Novella" is an irregular album, but contains two gems: "Can You Hear Me?", great epic classic Renaissance, and "The Captive Heart", in which Annie sings in choir with her overdubbed self doing THREE VOICES, and they still have to invent an adjective for that because "stunning", "amazing", and such are too little. From "A Song for All Seasons", you should listen to "Opening Out" followed by "Day of the Dreamer". It's not a real sequence in the Alan Parsons or Pink Floyd sense, they're not even joined or transitioned, but somehow the first track sets the mood and prepares your spirit for the second, and it's relatively short. I don't personally like the other songs very much. And a final piece of information: several of their record covers were designed by Storm Thorgerson's legendary Hipgnosis studio, the same that made Pink Floyd's covers at that time.

Great reaction! Annie has the voice of an Angel. Mother Russia, Scheherazade are some awesome songs of theirs to check out.

The first band I ever saw live back in the early 70's... Harrow. North London. Just Brilliant.

Love the backgrounds.

What a great band! They truly were unique and their music was in a class by itself.

Time for this Mortal Coil

I would suggest prolonged and raja Kahn for Annie's voice, never singing a word, just notes

A unique band with a great female singer. My introduction to this band was the album A Song for all Seasons. Opening Out/ Day of the dreamer and the titeltrack are definately worth a listen. But there is more! I Saw them live 5 years ago and Annie Haslam's voice was still amazing.

i attended a concert of this early 70s kiss was the opening act talk about a bad match

Obviously they aren’t going to fade out when they do this live. This is their concert closer too. So, while the live version (Live at Carnegie Hall) has inferior sound quality, the climatic end is a peak moment in all music for me. And Mr. Camp’s bass solo in the middle really showcases what a masterful talent he is. It would be worth doing that version, but I’m partial. Even if you don’t do the live version I urge you and your liteners to give it a listen… Annie’s vocals on that version are next level too.

Mother Russia and Northern Lights are really good songs, but so is Scheherazade (preferably live at Carnegie Hall). Can you go wrong with any or their songs, I think not!