40 Years and a Night with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra

Night Ranger have been going since the early 1980s, with two guitar heroes in Jeff Watson and Brad Gillis and seventeen million records sold. The playing was never in question; what actually set them apart was how good the tunes were. This is the record of one night marking forty years of that. On 9 November 2022, at the KeyBank State Theatre in Cleveland, they played their set with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra -- about a hundred musicians aged eleven to eighteen, drawn from some forty schools across Ohio, an ensemble that works exclusively on contemporary and new music and on crossing between genres. That "Sister Christian" and "Sentimental Street" would sit well with an orchestra is easy to guess. The surprise is what happens to the flat-out rockers: "(You Can Still) Rock in America" and "Don't Tell Me You Love Me" come off better than anyone had a right to expect. The line-up is Jack Blades on bass and vocals, Kelly Keagy on drums, Brad Gillis on guitar, Eric Levy on keyboards and Keri Kelli on guitar. Ward Records released it on 20 October 2023 in five configurations -- CD, Blu-ray, DVD, and first-press editions pairing the video discs with the CD. The Japanese CD adds Damn Yankees' "High Enough" as a bonus track, thirteen songs in all.