Ray Charles - The Genius of Soul is a well-crafted documentary of the great soul singer, but is, at the same time, a really disappointing DVD.
I call Ray Charles a soul singer, but he really sang it all - jazz, gospel, blues, even country & western. He didn't really fuse them; he just made them all his own.
This short (only 55 minutes) documentary gives a solid and sensitive account of the life of Ray Charles - how he lost his sight and his parents in one shocking childhood sequence, how, while in an orphanage, he discovered music. How he started his career by imitating role-models (including Nat 'King' Cole), and then slowly found his own voice.
He also slowly found other things too. Women, for one (at last count he has nine children by seven women). And cocaine, then heroin. One of his sons found him slowly bleeding to death after a botched injection. That's when he quit drugs - and why he's still with us today.
The account glosses over none of these things, but it also keeps the focus squarely on the music. It's well balanced and authoritative. Mac Rebenack (Dr John), Billy Joel, Willie Nelson and Billy Preston are amongst the friends and musical peers who help tell his story; even Billy Joel, whom I place in performance pretty well on a par with Elton John for banality, surprises with some precise insights.
The documentary uses old family footage and recent concert footage; the sources range over half a dozen decades, and are put together with great insight and understanding. It is a model of concise story-telling.
But this is not enough for a DVD. It was obviously a great one-hour television documentary, especially if the network screening it had followed up with a Ray Charles concert, but there's no concert here. There's not even a single complete song from the Master of Soul. Every song is either presented as an excerpt only, or with voice-overs.
The DVD packagers should have gone the extra mile. They should have sought out concert footage, or compiled a 'best hits' video package to fill out the disc. There's no point telling us all about Ray unless we can also see him in performance. After all, without his performances, there would have been no story worth the telling.
The slick says the program runs an hour - it's only 55 minutes. The DVD is a good full-screen transfer of an obviously made-for-television video program. Given the varying age of the source material, it's as good as one could hope for.
The sound also reflects the different ages of the source material, but the two-channel mono sound is robust, without distortion.
There is a five-sheet text discography, and the only other feature is a 'propaganda' section with shorts from four other music DVDs - Legends of Rock'n'Roll, a documentary about Marvin Gaye (we're not told the title), Billy Wyman's Blues Odyssey and Tony Bennett's New York.