Dave Payn
Active Member
This finally arrived on my doorstep, having paid £17 and have the first package come through with the case but no disc! I'm beginning to wonder if they should have bothered!
A nice idea to film London Brass playing and have some of the players talk about themselves (though it dates back to 1994) but the whole package is shoddily done form start to finish. Most of the 'playing' involves London Brass miming to tracks from their CDs (most obvious in Richard Bissil's arrangement of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes where the harmon muted trumpets on the recording are 'played' on this disc by trumpets with straight mutes!)
If that wasn't bad enough, the synchronisation between sound and action is out from start to finish, from the moment David Purser starts talking about the group to the 'miming' players. I guess they also decided it would be a laugh to swap the pads round, so you see Oren Marshall on tuba reading from the horn pad and Anne McAneney reading her flugel part from the trombone 4 pad.
There are some worthy moments, namely Oren Marshall demonstrating his amplified tuba with various pedals, as well as John Barclay and Richard Edwards jazzing in the Bull's Head pub, but the poor picture quality and the problems with sound, allied to the poor synchronisation, mean that for me, I couldn't recommend this DVD, despite the obvious excellent playing of the group from their CDs! A shame as there are precious few DVDs relating to brass ensembles as it is, though Canadian Brass have just re-released a CD compliation coupled with a DVD which may well be worth exploring.
A nice idea to film London Brass playing and have some of the players talk about themselves (though it dates back to 1994) but the whole package is shoddily done form start to finish. Most of the 'playing' involves London Brass miming to tracks from their CDs (most obvious in Richard Bissil's arrangement of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes where the harmon muted trumpets on the recording are 'played' on this disc by trumpets with straight mutes!)
If that wasn't bad enough, the synchronisation between sound and action is out from start to finish, from the moment David Purser starts talking about the group to the 'miming' players. I guess they also decided it would be a laugh to swap the pads round, so you see Oren Marshall on tuba reading from the horn pad and Anne McAneney reading her flugel part from the trombone 4 pad.
There are some worthy moments, namely Oren Marshall demonstrating his amplified tuba with various pedals, as well as John Barclay and Richard Edwards jazzing in the Bull's Head pub, but the poor picture quality and the problems with sound, allied to the poor synchronisation, mean that for me, I couldn't recommend this DVD, despite the obvious excellent playing of the group from their CDs! A shame as there are precious few DVDs relating to brass ensembles as it is, though Canadian Brass have just re-released a CD compliation coupled with a DVD which may well be worth exploring.