Chicago Blues Reunion – Buried Alive In The Blues (DVD/CD Dry reissue by Eagle Eye)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+/CD: B Extras: B- (CD) Main Program: B-
In 2005,
there was a get together from some of the biggest and best names in Blues music
to celebrate the music which is not exactly dead by any means, though not the
dominant genre by any means. However,
despite the success of the recent Chicago
Blues Reunion, the new documentary/concert program Buried Alive In The Blues is a mixed and odd 84 minutes that does
not say enough for its short length, which seems longer than it should.
Though
Blues fans will enjoy it, others might find it as choppy as this critic did,
going from thing to thing without really exploring the blues. Instead, it seems to want to squeeze too many
people in its length as a multiple promo of them instead of taking the
necessary time to explore them and the music.
Even the love and comments seem to overlap. It is also a historic record, but I would
have rather them taken longer with interviews and stopped chopping them with
decent performances than try to do too much.
Also, the
performances here do not come across too well on DVD, yet sound much better on
CD, making them much more enjoyable.
That is, if you like Blues to begin with. Perhaps the near glut of feature length
concert DVDs has affected my view of this somewhat, but the editing approach
just did not work. B. B. King leads the
roster of talent, old and new.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is soft and it is hard to tell if this
was shot in HD or (more likely) just digital, but it plays back well
enough. It is serviceable, but more if
not all would have been nice on film, though and HD-DVD or Blu-ray version
might look better. The Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo has no real surrounds, which is the same as the PCM 2.0 16-Bit/44.1kHz
Stereo from the CD, but that sounds much better and that makes it a key bonus
here, even if it is the only bonus.
There are no other extras.
This is a
reissue of the DVD/CD set directly sent to us by Out Of The Box Records a good
wild ago, covered by a fellow critic at the following link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3144/Chicago+Blues+Reunion+–+Buried+Alive+In+The+Blues+(DVD/CD+Set)
He liked
it a little more.
- Nicholas Sheffo
