THE NICE : HERE COMES... THE NICE [PHILIPS - ESP 1990] LP

The history of this release, originally a double LP combining the contents of two separate LPs (Five Bridges, Elegy), is strange. "Five Bridges" was a suite mixing rock trio and orchestra, in the same form though more ambitious (and successful) than their earlier "Ars Longa Vita Brevis." But their record label, Immediate Records, went bankrupt in late 1969, and the trio was left without a recording contract and owed a lot of money. In the meantime, Keith Emerson had been making plans to leave the trio and form a new group that would, among other differences, be stronger in the vocal department, but until the spring of 1970 he was still playing with the Nice. Amidst this chaos, the group's manager, Tony Stratton-Smith, had kept possession of about three LPs' worth of unreleased tapes by the band, keeping them out of the hands of Immediate and away from that company's creditors (of which the group was one). After Emerson's departure, he released the first of the group's posthumous albums, Five Bridges, which had been recorded late in 1969 -- Emerson wasn't happy to see the not quite finished project (as far as he was concerned) out and there were lawsuits, but the album came out, on Mercury Records in America and on Stratton-Smith's own newly formed Charisma label in England, and it did well -- enough so that Stratton-Smith was back a few months later with Elegy, a collection of live performances from the Fillmore East augmented with some late studio tracks. Mercury later cashed in on Emerson, Lake & Palmer's sudden rise to superstardom by combining the two as the budget-priced double-LP Keith Emerson With the Nice, packaged rather misleadingly with a photo of Emerson on-stage from a performance with ELP.