The Concert for Bangladesh the eighth best album of 1971. Among UK reviewers, Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian wrote: "What Woodstock was said to be, the Madison Square Garden Bangladesh concert was. It's on record. The concert will stand as the greatest act of magnanimity rock music has yet achieved." In Melody Maker, Richard Williams began his review by saying, "If you buy only one LP in 1972, make it this one." He likened Shankar and Khan's interplay on "Bangla Dhun" to "Charlie Parker trading licks with Johnny Hodges", and found Harrison's opening trio of All Things Must Pass tracks "[u]nbelievably ... in some ways even better" than the originals, and Preston's "That's the Way God Planned It" "feverishly exciting". Williams named Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" as "the masterpiece". In a causerie-style piece for New Statesman, Michael Nyman wrote that the music failed to support the claim that the concerts had educated listeners on the plight of the Bangladeshi refugees. He admired many of the performances but detected an "aloofness" in Shankar's sincerity and bemoaned that Dylan's outdated repertoire surpassed some of the more recent pop selections by Harrison and Preston, and that the lavish LP booklet "must have cost money which could have been channelled elsewhere". The NMEs Roy Carr and Tony Tyler deemed the concerts "probably the greatest indoor rock 'n' roll event ever held", adding that Dylan's five-song set "easily justified" the album's price tag. As at the time of the concerts, much was made by music journalists of the change in Dylan's singing voice, as well as his choice of songs, which harked back to the so-called protest period of 1962–64 and the creative zenith that culminated in his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was another track that received significant attention, thanks to the guitar "duelling" between Harrison and Clapton. Retrospective assessments and legacy In the description of author Ian Inglis, The Concert for Bangladesh "established the artistic legitimacy of the charity album". While the technical imperfections of the concert recordings were overlooked in 1972 – or even applauded for their adding to the "honesty" of the moment, in the case of Starr forgetting the lyrics to "It Don't Come Easy" – reviewers of the first CD-format album remarked on the relatively poor sound quality. In his review for AllMusic in 2001, Bruce Eder commented on the "less-than-perfect sound" while