Watch the Last, Transcendent Performance of “Echoes” by Pink Floyd Keyboardist Richard Wright & David Gilmour (2006)

“Gen­tle, unas­sum­ing and pri­vate.” These are the words David Gilmour chose in his eulo­gy of Richard Wright, Pink Floyd’s key­board play­er and co-song­writer, who joined the band in 1964 and stayed with them through all of their major albums, leav­ing after The Wall and rejoin­ing for A Momen­tary Lapse of Rea­son. Wright was the qui­et one; drum­mer Nick Mason com­pared him to George Har­ri­son, and like Har­ri­son, he was also Pink Floy­d’s secret weapon, help­ing to deliv­er many of their most career-defin­ing songs.

Wright may rarely get much men­tion in song­writ­ing trib­utes to Pink Floyd’s war­ring lead­ers or its trag­ic elfin first singer/songwriter Syd Bar­rett (“had his pro­file been any low­er,” one obit­u­ary put it, “he would have been report­ed miss­ing.”), but his “soul­ful voice and play­ing were vital, mag­i­cal com­po­nents of our most rec­og­nized Pink Floyd sound,” Gilmour went on. “In my view, all of the great­est PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow.”

Wright’s jazz train­ing gave an impro­visato­ry bent. His for­mal music edu­ca­tion gave him an ear for com­po­si­tion. He was the band’s most ver­sa­tile musi­cian, play­ing dozens of instru­ments in addi­tion to his sig­na­ture Farfisa organ, and he was equal­ly at home writ­ing orches­tral pieces or falling into what­ev­er groove the band cooked up, as on their sixth stu­dio album, Med­dle, which emerged from sev­er­al stages of exper­i­men­tal meth­ods and hap­py acci­dents like the “ping” sound Wright’s piano makes at the begin­ning of the sprawl­ing epic “Echoes,” the 23-minute sec­ond side of the album.

The song con­tin­ued to grow, over­dub by over­dub. Waters wrote lyrics, Gilmour exper­i­ment­ed with a sound effect he’d stum­bled on by plug­ging his wah-wah ped­al in back­wards. If you ask Wright, as Mojo did in their final inter­view with him in 2008, the year of his death, it was large­ly his piece. Or at least, “the whole piano thing at the begin­ning and the chord struc­ture for the song is mine.”

Like so many of Wright’s com­po­si­tions, “Echoes” is also a show­case for Gilmour’s soar­ing solos and del­i­cate rhythm play­ing. The inter­play between the two musi­cians is on tran­scen­dent dis­play in Wright’s final, live 2006 per­for­mance of the song before he suc­cumbed to can­cer two years lat­er, for an audi­ence of 50,000 at the Gdańsk Ship­yard in Poland, record­ed on the last show of Gilmour’s On an Island tour.

This is real­ly great stuff. The filmed per­for­mance, which appears on Gilmour’s album and con­cert film Live in Gdańsk, shows both Wright and Gilmour in top form, trad­ing solos and cre­at­ing the kind of atmos­phere only those two could. Gilmour has said he’ll nev­er per­form the song again with­out Wright. It’s hard to imag­ine that he even could.

The band closed with the 20-plus-minute “Echoes” every night of the tour, and Wright brought out his old Farfisa just for the song. Giv­en how long Gilmour and Wright had been com­plet­ing each other’s vir­tu­oso strengths as co-cre­ators of instru­men­tal moods, every per­for­mance on the tour was sure­ly some­thing spe­cial. But in hind­sight, none are as mov­ing as this one—the last time fans would ever have the expe­ri­ence of see­ing Pink Floyd, or one ver­sion of them, recre­ate the mag­ic of “Echoes” live onstage.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd Stream­ing Free Clas­sic Con­cert Films, Start­ing with 1994’s Pulse, the First Live Per­for­mance of Dark Side of the Moon in Full

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

Clare Torry’s Rare Live Per­for­mances of “Great Gig in the Sky” with Pink Floyd

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness