Search - Keyboard Wizards on DVD

Very little wizardry and out of phase audio

David Jameson | 07/27/2004

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Well, I surfed over to Amazon and bought the "Keyboard Wizards: Ultimate Anthology" based on the review in the August issue of Keyboard. I sure hope that by "Ultimate", they mean "last" rather than "best". What an incredibly disappointing DVD.

First of all, only a couple of the tracks actually have anything approaching "wizard" status. But Keith Emerson's performance is completely ruined because the audio is about a 1/2 a beat out of phase with the video - considering that the audio was supposedly completely remastered, you'd think they could have gone to the trouble of lining up the audio with the video properly. I can't help wondering how a reviewer for a music magazine could have missed this kind of thing? Geoff Downes' performance looks like it's slightly out of phase as well but it doesn't matter because he wasn't really doing very much!

As for Hensley on his B-3 and Moog, all he did with the latter was play an occasional bass note! While the music itself may be of interest to many, neither Hensley, Crane nor Sinclair was doing anything particularly wizardly from a keyboard perspective - perhaps just a bad choice of tracks.

It was definitely worth seeing the Focus video just to watch Thijs Van Leer playing the flute with one hand!


A waste of $20

Dr. David Jameson"