Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Sade: Bring Me Home - Live 2011 Blu-ray Movie Review

Does Sade give us the sweetest ta-Blu?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 23, 2012

Like many young kids, I was introduced to all sorts of music through the auspices of either my parents or more frequently my two older sisters, the eldest of whom is around twelve years older than I am. When this particular sister came back from college for summer vacation one year, I was still a very young child and became instantly smitten with three albums she had in her collection by a group with the strangely spelled name of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. (This was obviously in the days before the internet and I needed to do some actual hands on research to figure out why Brasil was spelled with an 's' rather than a 'z'.) Being a budding pianist myself, I was really fascinated by Mendes' keyboard chord voicings and the cool Latin sounds of this group, and Brasil ’66 (and later, other iterations of Mendes’ group) became a lifelong obsession of mine. When Sade first became a pop sensation with the release of “Smooth Operator” in 1984, many critics instantly compared the band’s sound to Mendes’, if few would have ever mistaken lead vocalist Sade Adu’s husky throated singing for the clarion calls of some of Sergio’s best known vocalists, including Lani Hall, Bonnie Bowden or Carol Rogers. (Sade’s voice actually is a bit closer to Mendes’ own wife, Gracinha Leporace, who has sung with her husband since the Brasil ’66 days). Sade’s music was never as sophisticated or harmonically challenging as Mendes’, but the cool percussion and smoky ambience of many of her tunes made her a best selling artist, one who easily was able to traverse the world of music video as well, with her sultry good looks and exotic persona. A well known songwriter who’s a friend of mine once joked that Sade had built her entire career on the minor ninth, and if that’s a bit of an arcane reference to anyone without some grounding in music theory, it at least gives a bit of an indication that Sade’s overall oeuvre is not exactly a paragon of innovation and radical musical thinking.

It’s a little hard to believe, but the lovely Ms. Adu is now over 50 years old, and it must be stated that she’s not quite as svelte as she was in her Top 40 prime. That said, she’s still a stunningly beautiful woman, and though no one would ever accuse Sade of being a phenomenally gifted vocalist, she brings her smoky, plangent quality to an almost two hour show here, taking center stage for almost the entire evening, which was filmed in Ontario, California in 2011. The show focuses the bulk of its stagecraft on some evocative lighting and some huge projections upstage of the band, as well as a recurring motif of hydraulic lifts that bring the band members (and Sade herself) into view and occasionally raise them up above the basic stage floor level.

The concert is a really good overview of the bulk of Sade’s career, going back to her first big hit “Smooth Operator” (which has a kind of bizarre noir set up with a big projected prelude replete with Bogart-esque voice over). Most of Sade’s best known tunes are done throughout the concert, though it doesn’t take a strictly chronological approach, and instead kind of picks and chooses from various eras, up to and including her most recent “Soldier of Love” songs. It’s indicative of how beloved Sade’s sound is that the mere sound of rim shots and kick drum can let the audience know just what song is about to be played, and the audience response is more often than not one of overwhelming cheers of support.

The coolest aspect visually about this concert is the very nice use of projections and a really neat use of a scrim which drops down in front of the band on a couple of occasions and lends a gauzy, almost surreal aspect to the proceedings, since aspects of the projections tend to blend in with the “real life” elements. The concert basically recreates the album versions of most of these tunes, so those hoping for new or exciting approaches to Sade’s oeuvre may be a bit disappointed. The large audience at the concert is obviously rapturously enthralled by being relatively up close and personal to their idol, and she maintains that ultracool but accessible persona which helped make her a superstar in the first place.

The set list for this concert is:

1. Soldier of Love

2. Your Love is King

3. Skin

4. Kiss of Life

5. Love is Found

6. In Another Time

7. Smooth Operator

8. Jezebel

9. Bring Me Home

10. Is It a Crime

11. Love is Stronger Than Pride

12. All About Our Love

13. Paradise

14. Nothing Can Come Between Us

15. Morning Bird

16. King of Sorrow

17. The Sweetest Taboo

18. The Moon and The Sky

19. Pearls

20. No Ordinary Love

21. By Your Side

22. Cherish The Day

Sade: Bring Me Home - Live 2011 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sade: Bring Me Home – Live 2011 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony – Epic with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The concert, filmed by Sophie Muller, gets off to a less than stellar start, with an overly dark screen augmented by brief flashes of light which illuminate the credits—just barely. Things aren't much better in the opening moments of the concert, where an overarching darkness envelops the stage and makes the players very hard to make out. Once the lights kick up, though, things improve dramatically, and the ubiquitous close-ups of Sade and her bandmates provide some very nice and natural fine object detail. Colors are very nice, though the band is dressed mostly in black and white, and Sade herself spends the first two thirds of the concert or so dressed in the same shades. She later changes into a white gown and then for the last couple of numbers a blazing red dress, and those pop quite nicely in this high definition presentation. There are some niggling issues with regard to the projections. While there isn't classic moiré on display here, there's something akin to concentric rings or lines that shimmer at times depending on the camera angle and how close to the projections any given shot actually is. There is also some very minor posterizing in a couple of passing moments where the players are awash in blue or red.

Sade: Bring Me Home - Live 2011 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sade: Bring Me Home – Live 2011 follows the usual Sony – Columbia – Epic tradition of providing the listener three audio options, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix, an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down, and a standard Dolby Digital 5.1 rendering. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is very nicely detailed, with the band spread across the front channels and the audience noise filling the side and rear channels, though never to overwhelming volume levels. (The audience, as audiences are wont to do, sings along with several tunes and it's impossible not to hear them in those moments.) Fidelity is excellent and the overall mix is also very good, though very occasionally Sade's voice disappears into the mix, some of which might be attributed to her microphone technique—she seems to forget occasionally to hold the microphone close enough to her mouth. There's not a whole lot of dynamic range here; after all, Sade's music tends to be cut from the same cloth, generally speaking, and there's simply no over the top playing or singing here. Instead, this is like a fine stew, simmering slightly and achieving its flavor through understatement rather than bombast.

Sade: Bring Me Home - Live 2011 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• How Do You Say Thank You? (HD; 21:04) is a behind the scenes featurette which has quite a bit of backstage footage, as well as rehearsal shots and set up and even some sequences of the band traveling.


• In the Trenches (HD; 6:22) features some pretty ragged looking footage from backstage, some of which looks like it was shot with a night vision camera.


• Three Seconds (HD; 2:44) features Gary Grimm, Drum Tech, explaining the rationale behind some backstage shenanigans which started in an attempt to keep Sade safe as she ran quickly to get costumes changed.

Sade: Bring Me Home - Live 2011 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Sade: Bring Me Home – Live 2011 is a nice career retrospective for the sultry singer and her band, but it also at around two hours points out the remarkable similarity of so much of her material. Sade has a cool, laid back ambience that is incredibly inviting, but that also means that there's not an overabundance of hysterical excitement on the part of either the band or the admittedly appreciative audience. Those who have loved Sade since her "Smooth Operator" days will no doubt love this outing, which revisits most of the band's big hits. The concert itself is very well staged with some great use of projections and some cool stagecraft with scrims and curtains, but no pyrotechnics, either figurative or literal. This Blu- ray is awfully light on the supplementary features, but it offers strong video and audio, and for fans especially, it comes Recommended.