Celebrate - The Best Of Tina Turner

Filmed on November 26, 2000, in honour of her 60th birthday, this intimate live concert serves as a reminder to the current generation of wannabe divas and inept R&B female artists that, without Tina Turner, they probably would not have even existed.

Director David Mallett, who has directed all of Tina's on-stage performances - including Private Dancer: Live and the superb Live in Amsterdam: Wildest Dreams Tour - perfectly captures the blistering kinetic energy of Tina's up-tempo numbers like River Deep, Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits, and the warmer intimacy of her slower ballads, such as Let's Stay Together and Talk to My Heart, with superlative ease.

Interspersed between the concert tracks are interviews with several musical dignitaries - Cher, Sting, Bill Wyman, Phil Spector, Mark Knopfler, among others - and their admiration for Tina is quite evident. Tina herself provides some illuminating details about her early childhood in Nutbush, Tennessee, where she was the youngest daughter of a sharecropping family, who eked out a meagre living through picking cotton.

Through these small segments we learn about Tina's introduction to the man who would irrevocably change her life for the better and worst, Ike Turner. From here, we are provided with insights about the formation of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, her disastrous relationship with Ike, the decline of her professional career and her triumphant resurgence as a rock music icon with the breakthrough single Ball of Confusion.

These brief segments - which also feature archival performances with rock illuminaries such as Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger, as well as birthday dedications to Tina - could be seen as somewhat intrusive and disruptive to the concert presentation. However, I found them to be quite intriguing and, strangely, they actually complement the concert sessions.

For those interested, the track listing is as follows:

1. River Deep, Mountain High
2. 24-7
3. What's Love Got To Do with It
4. Steamy Windows
5. When The Heartache Is Over
6. Whatever You Need
7. Don't Leave Me This Way
8. Let's Stay Together
9. Talk To My Heart
10. Hold On I'm Coming
11. It's Only Love (Duet with Bryan Adams)
12. Without You (Duet with Bryan Adams)
13. All The Woman
14. Nutbush City Limits
15. The Best

Celebrate! - The Best of Tina Turner is presented in a 1.85:1 screen aspect ratio and is 16:9 enhanced.

During the concert presentation, details are very sharp with excellent definition. Blacks are solid, with no evident MPEG artifacts. Flesh-tones are - with stage lighting permitting - wonderfully natural, and even when the main concert stage is lit up like a tree on Christmas morning, there is no colour bleeding or over-saturation.

However, moire manifests itself throughout the concert, with the main culprits being the steel mesh barricades which prevent the audience from falling off the platforms surrounding the main concert stage, and the black see-through nylon number that Tina wears through the concert's first quarter.

Also, some rather peculiar interlacing occurs during the opening track, River Deep, Mountain High, whenever the brass section of Tina's band is on screen. Thankfully, this optical anomaly does not appear anywhere else throughout the disc.

Taking into consideration the technical nightmares that are often associated with transferring a live concert to DVD, the aforementioned problems are relatively minor ones when one takes into account the concert presentation as a whole. They do not warrant any real alarm.

With the interview and archival sections, the video quality is somewhat variable. Some slight grain can be witnessed periodically, but most of this can be attributed to the age and nature of the source material. However, grain is also used for artistic reasons. For instance, during the introduction to Tina's home town of Nutbush, the grain is deliberately employed to achieve a gritty, journalistic effect.

There is no layer transition. Thus, this is a single-sided disc.

There are two sound selections available, Dobly Digital 5.1 as default, and Dolby Digital 2.0 - even though the DVD cover slick would suggest that there is but one. As with the glorious Live in Amsterdam: Wildest Dreams Tour, the sound quality is superb - and almost qualifies as reference material.

The vocals of Tina and her backing singers are crystal clear, with each word and phrase clearly audible. There is no evident low level noise or sound dropout. Of particular note is the extremely aggressive front soundstage which - in songs like River Deep, Mountain High, Hold On I'm Coming, and The Best - make it seem that Tina and her band are physically in the room with you.

The rear surrounds are primarily used for crowd effects and discrete audio, complementing the front speakers to great effect.

During the interview and archival footage sections, the audio appears to collapse into the front speakers, producing a psuedo mono and two-channel sound field. Because of the nature of this material, this is to be expected and is of no concern.

Promo videos: There are two - Whenever the Heartache is Over, directed by Paul Boyd, and Whatever You Need, directed by Jake Nava. Respectively running at 3:45 and 4:37, both clips are presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0. Of excellent quailty, both are featured in a 1.85:1 screen aspect ratio and are 16:9 enhanced.

Biography: Nine pages of notes, detailing the lead-up surrounding Tina's latest album, her life, and career highlights.

Photo Gallery: An animated photo gallery. set to the pulsating drive of When the Heartache is Over, this section simply features Herb Ritt's photographs of Tina merging in one another.

While I enjoyed Celebrate! - The Best of Tina Turner immensely, it should only be recommended for fans of Tina, or completists who wish to collect every DVD title featuring this talented and inspirational artist. If pressed, I would suggest purchasing Tina's awesome Live in Amsterdam: Wildest Dreams Tour if you want the fiery full-length concert experience.

However, for the avid collector, Celebrate! is certainly a worthy companion to the Amsterdam spectacle.