Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		0.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 17, 2025

It may or may not work as an actual orthographic example, but in a figurative sense at least it's impossible to spell "respect" and/or "r-e-s-p-e-c-t" without Aretha Franklin, and this ingratiating 1971 set of live performances culled from three nights at the venerable Fillmore West easily proves why. The album's set list is maybe just a little unusual, with Aretha doing cover versions of tunes that in some instances easily fit within what might be thought of as her "usual" R&B confines like "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (which was later done as a studio recording), but also some less expected material that might show just a bit of shoehorning stylistically to fit into Aretha's approach. What might be called the "dialectic" between performer and material may provide a few unsettled moments in tunes like "Love the One You're With" and perhaps especially "Make It With You", though Aretha just kind of throws caution to the wind with an unabashedly funky take on "Eleanor Rigby" that seems to be saying something like, "Yeah, it's a bizarre song for me to be doing like this, deal with it". This was a relatively successful album when it was first released, and the backing band features a number of standouts like Billy Preston and Cornell Dupree, with Ray Charles also providing a duet version of "Spirit in the Dark", which Aretha also tackles as a solo piece on another track.

The album's track list can be seen in the screenshots of the disc menu I've uploaded to accompany this review. This release duplicates the original album and does not include the bounteous bonus tracks that were offered as part of Rhino's expanded multi CD release from several years ago.

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Once again as with most of the Quadio releases, the video content here is simply the static menu seen in the screenshots I've uploaded to accompany this review. Unfortunately the inconsistency in authoring I've been mentioning in several reviews of Quadio releases continues apace here, with this being another release that not only doesn't support changing audio codecs via the colored buttons on the remote, once you navigate down to the bottom of the menu and change the codec, the song starts over. The fact that Rhino has released any number of audio Blu-rays with toggling accessible and continual playback (albeit at times with an HDMI handshake) makes this especially frustrating. As can be seen in the screenshots, the colors of the track names change as you cycle through.

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West features DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 options. This is another interesting quadraphonic mix that in terms of channelization kind of reminded me of the recently reviewed Curtis Mayfield: Roots, since on this album vocals tend to be weighted toward the rear channels quite a bit of the time. The front channels actually struck me as underutilized in a couple of tunes, though there are some standout moments of clear engagement, like the brass at the beginning of "Make It With You". There's an appealing spaciousness to the presentation, but no doubt due to the live recording element I actually found the sound here to be less immediate and "up close and personal" as I would have liked.

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

As with every Quadio release I've reviewed, there is no on disc supplemental material (and I'm sure some fans will be disappointed about the absence of previously released bonus tracks, though the Quadio discs do tend to duplicate original releases). The insert booklet recreates the original album's cover information, while offering the Quadio standbys of a picture of the boxes holding the master tapes, as well as Rhino's typical verbiage on setup.

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Live at Fillmore West Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This is frankly not my favorite Aretha Franklin album, and if pressed I'd probably even say it's not my favorite live Aretha Franklin album (that would probably be 1972's Amazing Grace), but this offers a somewhat unusual playlist and a stellar backing band offering support for Aretha's majestic vocal and piano skills. Recommended.