Klugh, Earl-The Jazz Channel Presents (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Featurette-Meet The Artist
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	73:04
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (50:52)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Waymer Johnson
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Earl Klugh
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$39.95	Music	Earl Klugh

    Acoustic jazz guitarist Earl Wilbert Klugh, Jr. was born on 16 September 1954 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Early influences include Chet Atkins, Burt Bacharach, the Beatles and Sergio Mendes. While still in his mid-teens he recorded with Yusef Lateef and George Benson. He was also member of Chick Corea's famous group Return To Forever before embarking on a solo career in the mid-1970s. Some of his early albums feature a collaboration with pianist/composer Bob James. He has had a very successful career, having released nearly 30 albums.

    Earl's musical style can best be described as "smooth" or contemporary jazz - a space that is occasionally also occupied by the likes of Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour. His music has a silky sweetness that hovers dangerously close to the muzak syrup where musicians like Kenny G belong, but fortunately he is rescued by a top notch group of seasoned musicians (unfortunately uncredited) in this concert. Unlike most jazz guitarists, Earl uses a finger-picking style that is more reminiscent of classical guitar.

    All in all, I quite enjoyed this concert, probably because I have a soft spot for smooth jazz.

Video

    In general, this is a good transfer, with sharpness, detail and shadow detail slightly above average for a video source. There was little or no evidence of video noise, unlike some of the other discs in the "Jazz Channel Presents" series. There are some signs of edge enhancement but fortunately not excessively so.

    Colour saturation was good, without going into over-saturation.

    The transfer is relatively devoid of MPEG artefacts. There is occasional aliasing, shimmering and moiré patterns, particularly around Earl's guitar but I did not find these annoying. I suspect that this transfer has been upconverted from NTSC to PAL.

    Surprisingly, this DVD actually comes with several subtitle tracks. I turned on the Italian subtitle track just for fun, and was rewarded with: nothing. Well, what did I expect? All the performances are instrumental, and Earl doesn't have a mike so even when he says "Thank you" we don't get to hear it.

    This disc is labelled DVD9 indicating that it is a single sided dual layer disc (RSDL). The layer change occurs at 50:52 minutes into the concert. Although it does disrupt the concert, in the grand scheme of things this is not an annoying change and it happens during a quiet spot in between songs.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    I did not detect any audio glitches or synchronization issues.

    Most of the other discs in the "Jazz Channel Presents" series have 5.1 tracks that are remixed from an original stereo master but to my surprise this disc appears to have a "native" or discrete 5.1 track as all speakers were active during the concert. The audience noises are reasonably distinctly spread across most of the speakers. The surround speakers are rather more actively engaged than one might expect from that generated by "fake" surround processing, and certain instruments - such as the tom toms just after 10:04 - appear to be aggressively mixed into the surround channels.

DTS vs Dolby Digital

    The Dolby Digital 2.0 track, in comparison to the 5.1 tracks, has a collapsed soundstage and has been mastered at a much lower level. I don't know why they bothered to include this on the disc.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Featurette - "Meet the Artist" (16:58)

    Earl talks about his childhood inspiration Chet Atkins, meeting Yusef Lateef and George Benson, his musical style and even his love for movies. He seems to be responding to questions posed by an anonymous interviewer, but unfortunately we don't get to find out what the questions are so sometimes his answers seem a bit disjointed.

    This featurette has three audio tracks but they all appear to be identical (Dolby Digital 2.0). Surprisingly, the featurette comes with a number of foreign language subtitle tracks. There is an audio glitch at 14:53 in the featurette.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall