Bobby Womack-The Jazz Channel Presents (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Biographies-Cast Featurette-Meet The Artist
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	86:48
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (55:00)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Waymer Johnson
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Bobby Womack
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$39.95	Music	Bobby Womack

    Bobby Womack was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944. He started his musical career early (in the 1950s) along with his brothers in a group called the Womack Brothers which was later renamed to the Valentinos. Bobby then joined Sam Cooke's band as a guitarist and, after Sam's death, concentrated on songwriting and session work with artists like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix and Wilson Pickett. He also had some success as a solo artist in the 1960s and 1970s and more recently in his comeback records Poet and Poet II.

    In this concert, Bobby is backed by a 10 piece band and 2 backup singers. Bobby has a pretty dynamic stage presence, and I quite enjoyed the songs in the latter half of the concert. He talks a fair bit in between songs, but unfortunately I found it quite difficult to follow exactly what he was saying. I even turned on the Italian subtitles to try and find out what he was trying to say in English! He does a fair bit of name dropping between chapters 7 and 8 (Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield amongst others).

    Bobby is joined by Val Young singing in You're Welcome To Stop On By, and by Richard Rossi playing a sax solo in No Matter How High I Get. The end titles are superimposed towards the end of Amen/This Little Light of Mine, which I found mildly annoying.

Video

    In general, the transfer seems reasonably clean, with sharpness, detail and shadow detail about typical for a video source.

    Colour saturation was good, but I thought a bit over-saturated at times. There is occasional aliasing and shimmering (including horizontal dot crawls) which are tell-tale signs of NTSC to PAL upconversion but fortunately these artefacts are relatively minor. I also noticed some low-level video noise that verged on being unacceptable at times.

    Surprisingly, this DVD actually comes with several subtitle tracks. I was hoping that one of the subtitle tracks would be in English and that the song lyrics would be transcribed onto the track. But alas, no such luck! The subtitle tracks here contain translations of Bobby's in-between songs stage banter (which is quite extensive at times!) into various foreign languages but do not include translations of the lyrics to the songs. I turned on the Italian subtitle track for a brief period (and also to try and understand what he was trying to say!). The translation was pretty comprehensive and accurate, although I am not too sure about the spelling for some of the slang words ("kunk"?).

    This disc is a single sided dual layer disc (RSDL). The layer change occurs at 55:00 minutes into the concert. It is a fairly disruptive change - on my DVD player the screen freezes for almost a second, but at least it was between songs (near the transition between Chapters 10 and 11). Given that there were no real periods of silence during the concert, I can't really think of a more optimal spot for the layer change.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The DTS track is actually more like a 4.0 track since the centre channel was not engaged during the entire concert. The soundstage is very front-focused, with the rear surround speakers mainly carrying ambience information. The original audio source must have been in stereo and then remixed into 5.1. In cases like this, I would have preferred it if they just gave us the original stereo track as a PCM audio track for maximum quality.

    The Dolby Digital track sounded very similar, in fact it was hard for me to differentiate between the two. I also listened briefly to the Dolby Digital 2.0 track. In comparison to the 5.1 tracks it has a collapsed soundstage and has been mastered at a much lower level.

    I did not detect any audio glitches or synchronization issues.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Biography - Bobby Womack

Featurette - "Meet the Artist" (9:26)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall