Kooper booked two days of studio time at CBS Columbia Square in Los Angeles in May 1968,and recruited keyboardist Barry Goldberg and bassist Harvey Brooks,both members of the Electric Flag,along with well-known session drummer "Fast" Eddie Hoh. On the first day,the quintet recorded a group of mostly blues-based instrumental tracks. It included the modal excursion "His Holy Modal Majesty",which was a tribute to modal jazz musician John Coltrane,who had died the previous year,and was also reminiscent of "East-West" from the second Butterfield Blues Band album. On the second day,with the tapes ready to roll,Bloomfield returned to his home in Mill Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area,saying he had been unable to sleep.[6]
Needing to have something to show for the second day of booked studio time,Kooper hastily called upon Stephen Stills,who was in the process of leaving his band,Buffalo Springfield,to replace Bloomfield. Regrouping behind Stills,Kooper's session men cut mostly vocal tracks,including "It Takes a Lot to Laugh,It Takes a Train to Cry" from Highway 61 and a lengthy and atmospheric take of "Season of the Witch" by Donovan.[7] Although Harvey Brooks's closing "Harvey's Tune" includes overdubbed horns added in New York City while the album was being mixed,the album only cost $13,000 to complete.
The success of the album opened the door for the "supergroup" concept of the late 1960s and 1970s,as exemplified by the likes of Blind Faith and Crosby,Stills &Nash. Despite the fact that Bloomfield left the recording session after the first day,he and Kooper made several concert appearances after the album was released. The results of one of those became the album The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper.[8]
Releases
Along with the stereo version,Super Session was released as a 4-channel quadraphonic version in the 1970s. The quadraphonic version was released on SQ matrix encoded vinyl and discrete 8-track cartridge tape. On April 8,2003,Legacy Records reissued the album on compact disc with four bonus tracks,including both an outtake and a live track with Bloomfield,and two with the horn overdubs mixed out.
In the early 2000s,it was intended that it would be remixed for the new 5.1 channel version to be released on SACD. But in late 2004,Al Kooper commented:
To the best of my knowledge, based on an unnamed source, the new head of SONY/BMG shut down the 5.1 SACD department and let everyone go. A year and a half ago I remixed Super Session and Child Is Father to the Man for them in 5.1 SACD. They both came out incredible and so I mastered them with Bob Ludwig. Now it seems they will languish on the shelves under the current administration of SONY/BMG...Typical, in soooo many ways."[9]
Both 5.1 remixed SACDs were released in 2014 by Audio Fidelity. The original quadraphonic mix of Super Session was released on Hybrid SACD by Sony Records Int'l in 2023.
Legacy
In their retrospective review, Lindsay Planer of AllMusic comments on the album's original impact:
"As the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) had done a year earlier, Super Session (1968) initially ushered in several new phases in rock & roll's concurrent transformation. In the space of months, the soundscape of rock shifted radically from short, danceable pop songs to comparatively longer works with more attention to technical and musical subtleties."[1]
In 2005, Dan Daley of Sound on Sound credited Super Session for "[putting] the jazz-based notion of the jam session squarely into the mainstream of rock."[12] Daley praised Stills for accepting Kooper's invitation to join the jam, saying it "turned what would have been a musically astute jam session record into an all-star record event, laying the groundwork for a slew of 'supergroup's to come."[13]
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