Paul Simon's Concert in the Park Paul Simon's Concert in the Park Paul Simon's Concert in the Park is a live album released in 1991 by Paul Simon. It provided a survey of his two most recent albums, "Graceland" and "Rhythm of the Saints", and also drew liberally from his earlier songbook including a number of tunes from the Simon and Garfunkel era. 600,000 people were initially claimed to have attended the show, which was held in Central Park, New York City on August 15, 1991. Later estimates determined that the maximum number of people who could fit in the park space was 48,500. The concert
The Concert in Central Park the backing band was "one of the finest groups of musicians ever to play together at a New York rock concert", and the rearrangements of Simon's solo material were improvements over the originals. Despite the risks in performing so many acoustic ballads in an open-air concert on a cool night, the songs "were beautifully articulated, in near-perfect harmony." An October 1981 review in "Rolling Stone" called the concert "one of the finest performances of [1981]", one that "vividly recaptured another time, an era when well-crafted, melodic pop bore meanings that stretched beyond the musical sphere and into the realms of