How to define the musical genius that is Ray Charles? How to define a career that has spanned four decades and doesn’t seem to show any signs of slowing? The short answer is, you can’t. The long answer is, also, you can’t.
Here Ray gives his regular 100 percent at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1997. This ageless performer, none too fond of encores, runs his playlist in trademark style, building up to his usual killer finish with What’d I Say?. For countless decades, Ray Charles has finished each show with this one song; a song which was made up one evening to fill in the last ten minutes of a set in which he could think of nothing else to play. Telling his band to follow him, Ray started playing around with a tune and the rest is history. What’d I Say? has appeared in multiple forms on multiple albums now and is always the final song of his act. Perhaps that track itself can signify the style of Ray Charles’ music, but his rich jazz style has not only found him a massive fanbase over the years, it has also been touted as one of the very building blocks of modern music itself. No accident then that they call him ‘the Genius of Soul’.
Here Ray performs with his orchestra and the Raelettes, a five-piece female backing band of vocalists. Running through a series of tracks that come from all corners of his illustrious career, Ray proves he can still bang ‘em out with the best of ‘em. Herein we welcome 16 songs from Ray and a couple from his band to open the show. The playlist goes a little somethin’ like this…
- Introduction/I Don’t Know/Ray Charles Opener
- I’ll Be Home
- Busted
- Georgia On My Mind
- Mississippi Mud
- Just For A Thrill
- You Made Me Love You
- Angelina
- Scotia Blues
- Song For You
- Do It To Me Slow
- Watch Them Dogs
- Shadows Of My Mind
- Smack Dab In The Middle
- I Can’t Stop Loving You
- People Will Say We’re In Love
- What’d I Say
My highlights there are in bold type, with one of my personal all-time favourite songs in Georgia On My Mind. Big tip o’ the hat to the moron who mispelled this on the rear of the case. Who’s Gerogia?
On the video front, this isn’t much to look at unfortunately. Happily, the Umbrella people make these discs so they open immediately like a CD, so you don’t have to navigate menus or whatever, just stick it in and let it go. So if you don’t have a TV you won’t miss much here. However, the picture (for those with tellies) suffers some major compression woes with pixellation and aliasing all over the place throughout. This is a very dark show and the shadow detail isn’t any good, really, with macro blocking frequently occurring in shadowed areas. On a good note though, Ray sports an absolutely killer jacket and tuxedo, which looks 1000 percent better than the jacket on the cover of the DVD. In fact, he never even wears the cover jacket in this film… which is good, because it’s kinda ugly.
Well, this is primarily a music DVD, so the audio would wanna be good. And it is. Dolby 5.0 surround does just fine here and there are no real issues with any of the channels at all. Crowd noise and backing band noise are all separated with the bulk of the music hitting us from the centre speaker. The subwoofer stays vibrating for the whole film, supporting the deeper range of the piano and other instruments.
Ray himself speaks on a valuable extra here in the audio commentary. Ray is lead through the show with poignant (pre-written) questions by an interviewer who doesn’t give his name (or if he did I missed it). However, he certainly seems to know his music and allows Ray the mic for the majority of the chat. There are brief pauses of ten or 15 seconds, sometimes longer, but the music is piping through at a lower volume, so it isn’t dead air, thankfully. Ray seems to be an entirely humble man and genuine regarding his love for music and respect for other artists. Ray’s diatribe about his dislike of the encore is quite funny in the ending here and worth hanging out for, but the overall commentary is still very interesting. He’s an amazing artist and quite charming as a speaker too.
A selected discography is also included and this runs for nine text pages. Also included are two trailers for other releases in Thelonious Monk and Chaka Khan Live.
Ray Charles is such a recognisable figure in modern music, it’s hard to imagine a music world without his influence. Having won more than a dozen Grammy Awards, he has certainly proven himself and his abilities during his never-ending career.
Fans will enjoy this performance, as I’m sure they will any performance of Ray’s caught on tape or otherwise. He gives everything he’s got to each and every time he plays and this live set from 1997 is no exception. Excellent stuff from this amazing musician.
