Review of Later With Jools Holland: Hip Hop Soul

Introduction

Another Later DVD makes its way to our shelves, this time loosely shoe-horning in plenty of tracks under the banner of "Hip Hop Soul". Later is probably the premier music show on TV nowadays, combining artists old and new and all musical genres. If you like a bit of everything, you`ll catch it on the show. And more often than not, Jools will be playing along.

A quick look at the line up of this disc just shows some of the diverse artists collected together over the years under the "Hip Hop Soul" banner (their definition not mine).

Video

A 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, which is as it was first broadcast. It all looks pretty good, and probably just the same as it did went it first went out on the airwaves. It`s possible that some of the older tracks on here were recorded as full frame, but BBC policy seems to be to zoom the picture on older material to make it look widescreen.

As to what you see on screen - it`s just bands performing, with the odd one or two artists being more animated (Ludacris wanders all over the studio performing "Stand Up", and a camera tries its best to follow).

Audio

Just a DD2.0 stereo soundtrack, again as first broadcast. This is a bit of a let-down for me, as I always like music DVDs to have more than 2 channels where possible. Perhaps the necessary audio masters are not available for remixing, but it`s always a shame to just get stereo.

What you do get is fine though, and there are no problems with it. Interesting to hear some of these songs and some of these artists performing live.

Features

You can select your favourite 6 tracks and play them using the special player (or you could just use your DVD player`s features - most of them allow this sort of thing).

Also included is the option to see the interview segments from the show for some of the artists who have performed (not necessarily the ones you want to see interviewed though!)

Conclusion

A reasonable effort. Later is a top show, and some of the performances here are very good indeed. As has been noted before, it`s the kind of show that seems to bring out the best in people (e.g. Moby`s great version of "Go" performed some years back, but not included here, maybe there`ll be another compilation with that on). My favourite here was probably Ms. Dynamite, bringing real instruments in makes a big difference to the song. But there`s even something to be said for Ludacris performing over a backing track, with some live scratching thrown in.

Whilst there were only about 6 tracks on here that I liked (Ms. Dynamite, Macy Gray, Ludacris, Alicia Keys, Jamelia and The Fugees), there is enough diversity to satisfy most fans of this kind of genre. But as with all compilations, there`s always bound to be some stuff you don`t like. So that`s the bottom line - if the stuff you like outweighs the stuff you don`t, you`ll probably go for this.

I`ll probably give it a few more spins to listen to my favourite tracks, but I wouldn`t have gone out and bought it, as there`s too much filler for me. Your mileage may vary!