The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.5

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Blu-ray Movie Review

Controlled chaos.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 2, 2012

Hi, I’m Jeff and I am a musicholic. Are there support groups for people addicted to music, especially the more outré and outlandish sorts of things that seemed to be staples of American popular culture from the 1950’s through at least the 1960’s? If so, I should probably sign up right away. But even taking away that limited genre, as anyone who’s seen my home will tell you, I am a rabid enjoyer of virtually all kinds of music and I have the rooms full of CDs and LPs to prove it. As some of you who regularly read my classical reviews already know, I have made at least part of my living as a professional musician for decades, and that has included everything from conducting musical theater to performing in classical chamber and symphony orchestras to playing a lot of jazz (especially Brazilian tinged jazz, which is probably my personal favorite). That means I have a huge collection of recordings in about every genre imaginable, but I must admit I have a certain fondness for the occasional odd little release by people like Martin Denny or Enoch Light and even Percy Faith. One of Faith’s fellow master string arrangers was a man who also had feet in both the classical and pop music fields, Felix Slatkin (father of the St. Louis Symphony conductor Leonard). Felix Slatkin won several Grammy Awards and toured regularly with his classical Hollywood String Quartet, but he was also the preferred concertmaster for such pop artists as Frank Sinatra. Slatkin also released a number of really excellent “easy listening” albums in the early sixties (before his untimely death from a heart attack), and one of the weirdest, yet most wonderful, CDs in my collection is the fabulous rerelease of Slatkin’s LP “Hoedown”, an album which remade American folk music in the guise of a big string orchestra. Slatkin’s approach is awfully prescient in a way of some of the really interesting collaborations between Yo Yo Ma and a number of other artists which have revisited American folk music from a classically trained perspective. The latest in this line of releases is the wonderful The Goat Rodeo Sessions, an all star assemblage of classical musicians who perform folk flavored originals, giving them that certain savoir faire that comes from a lifetime of mastering their individual instruments.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live was streamed live to theaters as well as recorded as a television special broadcast on PBS, both releases following up the album The Goat Rodeo Sessions. As the four main members of this quartet —Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, Stuart Duncan and Edgar Meyer—discuss in a brief pre-credits sequence, the term “goat rodeo” is a metaphor for a kind of controlled chaos, though each of the four puts their own spin on what they individually think the term might refer to with regard to their collaboration. After the credits sequence, we get Ma yet again talking for a moment about the term “goat rodeo” as well as giving a bit of background on how this particular assemblage came to pass. As lovers of eclectic music will no doubt no, Ma himself has collaborated previously with both Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile on such wonderful albums as Appalachian Journey and Appalachia Waltz, but according to Ma’s brief commentary, this particular outing actually began with Meyer and Thile and then ended up included Stuart Duncan as well as guest vocalist Aoife O’Donovan. There may be a bit (or more than a bit) of false modesty in Ma’s recounting of the history here.

Once the music finally gets underway, listeners are in for a nonstop treat of genre bashing sounds. There is a hugely disparate variety of sounds here, with everything from semi-traditional sounding material bumping up against decidedly more modern sounds. A perfect example is the second tune, “Where’s My Bow?”, which almost sounds like a traditional fiddle reel until you realize that what’s happening is in fact a kind of deconstruction of minimalism with a decided tip of the riffing hat to Philip Glass. Over and over again these marvelous musicians manage to craft mélanges of material that wouldn’t seem to be able to be joined together.

There are several highlights throughout this concert (and in fact some could argue quite convincingly that the entire concert is one big highlight). A piano is added to such tunes as “Franz and the Fiddle”, and adds a gentle, tentative feeling that is quite redolent of a jazz based group that also worked in a chamber music setting, the wonderful assemblage named after my home state, Oregon. O’Donovan adds her ethereal voice to a few tunes as well, and “No One But You” comes off akin to something like Enya singing the blues. It’s interesting that in an evening comprised mostly of originals, the concert closes with an actual, honest to goodness, folk tune, “All Through the Night,” delivered in a simple but elegant rendition that is incredibly touching.

Lovers of the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? will also enjoy one of the few spoken moments in this concert. Stuart Duncan, who performed on the concert tour that helped promote the film's incredible score, has a very funny anecdote about how he came to name his piece "Hill Justice".

The set list for The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live is:

1. Quarter Chicken Dark
2. Where’s My Bow?
3. Here and Heaven
4. Franz and the Eagle
5. Helping Hand
6. 13:8
7. Hill Justice
8. No One But You
9. Attaboy
10. All Through The Night

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony and WGBH with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This is an extremely sharp and well defined outing that is one of the best live concert videos in recent memory, with deep, burnished colors and overall very impressive contrast. Fine object detail is also quite impressive, to the point where individual dings on the various instruments can be clearly seen. Even though several of the musicians are wearing dark clothing, black levels are strong and really well delineated, so there are virtually no problems with shadow detail or crush. In fact about the only anomaly is some very minor fading into the background with regard to O'Donovan, perhaps because she's placed kind of to the far stage left side of the theater and may be out of the prime lighting scheme.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live, as with most Blu-ray live music releases offered by Sony, is afforded three audio options, uncompressed LPCM tracks in both 5.1 and 2.0, as well as a standard Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix. The audio here is simply stellar. The LPCM 5.1 mix is breathtakingly clear, and the surround channels invite the listener into the sometimes delicate interplay between the instruments. The mix here follows the standard operating procedure of spreading the instruments across the front channels, with the occasionally boisterous audience sounds bringing up the rear (so to speak), but there's such a fluid spaciousness to this mix that all of the incredibly complex counterpoint that makes up a lot of this musical material. Fidelity is top notch and there's some really breathtaking dynamic range spread throughout these tracks as well.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bonus Tracks (1080i; 22:42) contains four extra songs which well display this group's incredible versatility. The four numbers are:
  
  Fiddle Medley
  Less is Moi
  Parallax
  Bach: Gamba Sonata No. 1, Movements 3 & 4.
  
  Just taking the first and last offerings proves that this group can tackle anything they set their minds (and/or fingers) to. The opening tune (actually tunes) is one of the more traditional sounding in the entire set list, while the last piece is a gorgeous recreation of one of Bach's beautiful chamber pieces.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live might not be immediately exciting to many out there, people who might think this is classical music (the horror) or even "too smart for its own good" revisionism with regard to the great American Folktune songbook. It's really neither, though it includes elements of both of these ideas. What this is more than anything is just simple, unadulterated great music. There is such thrilling musicianship on display, and the song list here is so varied, that this is a veritable horn of plenty of various styles and idioms (despite the fact that no horns are included in the instrumentation). There's an obvious rapport between these musicians, and so tempi can change with nary an inkling given other than a brief nod of the head, and the interplay between all of the players dances an incredibly fine line between notated brilliance and the joy of improvisation. Take some advice from someone who loves virtually all kinds of music, but who is nonetheless a stickler for quality and informed expression: take a chance on The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live, even if you don't think it's something you're innately interested in. You very well may be nicely surprised. With excellent video and unbeatable audio, The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live comes Highly recommended.