Lee Loughnane: New Chicago Album Is a Capsule of Early 'Performance and Rehearsal' That 'Got Lost in the Mix' (Exclusive)

Loughnane suggests the body of work, a collection of live performances from 1971, has been reworked more than ever before using modern recording technology

Lee Loughnane knows there's no time like the present to revisit a classic.

The trumpeter and founding member of the legendary band Chicago tells PEOPLE about the group's forthcoming album – Chicago at the John. F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. (9/16/1971), available Sept. 27 – and what ultimately made the group decide to revisit the over half-century old performance as a live album.

At the time, Chicago's definitive hit, "Saturday in the Park," hadn't even been fully fleshed out yet, evident by the noticeable differences in the forthcoming recorded version.

"Peter Cetera sang it during that show," Loughnane recalls. "And the songs that we had to play, stuff that we were working on for the next album at such a prestigious gig... I'm going, ‘Man, we got a lot of balls to be able to do something like that.'"

"We had it back then," he says of the band's energy towards experimental live performance at the time. "It was like, 'You're going to listen to us and this is what we're working on now, and what do you think?'"

"Dialogue wasn't completed yet," Loughnane adds. "So we didn't even know that there was a part two. Dialogue was only the first half of the song, and then we just sort of ended after the guitar solo."

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The early performance was during a pivotal time for the band, as the trumpeter recalls, highlighting that Chicago was "changing up our set every night because it was at a time where we didn't have all the production and the lights and the sound, and we only had the microphones that were right in front of us. Nobody was walking around on the stage. So we just got out there, planted our feet, like I said before, and just played our music and that was it."

"It was as much performance and rehearsal simultaneously for sure," he says. "It was pretty cool that we were allowed to do that and got away with it. That's the thing that amazes me the most."

Now, Loughnane has revisited that raw, experimental live performance, which he claims was "lost in the mix through all of the years and we forgot that it was even there."

For this special release of the tracks that have not been heard since that fateful September day in 1971, Loughnane says the "best thing about" revisiting the old recordings was that "50 years ago there was no capability of being able to make it sound as good as we [are now] able to make it sound."

"Now we [are] able to go in and get into each instrument and voice and be able to cut the ambience in between each note and be able to bring the music out so you can enhance it," he shares of the mastering process, completed alongside audio engineer Tim Jessup. "And every time you turn something up, you're not bringing up the entire hall along with it, so you can feature the music that was [less] notable before."

Related: Rock Legends Chicago Recall the Shocking Death of Guitarist Terry Kath

Chicago at the John. F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. (9/16/1971), will be available Sept. 27 on all major streaming services as well as 4-disk LP and 3-disk CD.

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