Customer Reviews

Best of the Big Bands - Artie Shaw and Friends

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a nice DVD that I use for in-class examples in Jazz History. The clips are mostly taken from film appearances - the Shaw "Concerto" is from "Second Chorus" - but it's great to have them COMPLETE. Lots of excerpts from these clips are used in the Ken Burns "Jazz" extravaganza, but sometimes I just want to show the clip without all of the talking over top of it. A couple of TV spots (Sullivan? Early Carson?) by Goodman are actually live, so you don't always have to suffer through the "lip-synching" common of most musical shorts. And, of course, the Krupa stuff is generally hard to come by, and is very welcome on this disc.

I thought the overall quality is about as good as it's going to get, considering these are film clips from 60+ years ago, and live TV appearances that were taped. This is a good package, at a good price.

I thought that this dvd was inferior to vhs versions of these performances. Most of these film clips were and probably still are available on vhs tapes. MPI's ten volume vhs set, now out of print but available thru Amazon, titled Music Classics has most of these selections at a far better quality video and audio wise.

This DVD is neither endorsed nor authorized by the estate of Artie Shaw. It is a compilation of the playing of several big bands. The main complaint I have about it is the extremely poor quality of the filming. After that comes the awkward editing where there does not appear to be any logical connection between the scenes. Some pretty good playing is shown though the quality of sound is minimal at best. I do not recommend this DVD. There are other really fine DVDs of big bands that do much better. One that comes to mind right away is the series Jazz by Ken Burns.

He certainly gave Benny Goodman a run for his money, just fabulous to see these masters at work (if you could call it that)

Love seeing big band at their greatest along with the greatest music. I wish they had listed the names of the musicans.