Comments
Fink's Comments(rates this release 4.75/5.0)
The Emancipation Concert footage featured here has appeared on a couple of releases already, ‘Freedom - Vol.1’ being the most obvious one. The quality on that release was very high so it was always going to be tough to top it, but it seems DFB may have just about done it. Certainly the first thing you’ll notice is the audio is very clear and well-balanced. Pumped through a set of good speakers, the bass is sharp and pleasingly rich and vocals very clear.

The picture itself is also top grade. Having compared this to the other release it’s pretty tough to call but if I had to push for a choice I’d go with this one. Colours are well defined without being to over-saturated and on the whole are very clear with sharp, defined edges. Definitely some careful work done with the transfer. The concert itself is a fairly short and sweet affair, coming in at just over 25 minutes and was put on by Prince to celebrate his ‘liberation’ from Warner Brothers. It’s a fairly straight forward show with nothing really to shout home about other than a particularly wonderful and uniquely different performance of ‘Joy In Repetition’

The bonus footage added here is taken from MTV’s ‘Essential’ series and is basically an extended look at the life of Prince or ‘The Artist’ as he was calling himself at that point in time. Broadcast during the Emancipation years, it’s pretty well put together, mixing up various interview snippets, official videos etc. It also features a few fantastic live performances, namely a bit of Lovesexy in Paris and some Diamonds & Pearls tour footage from Tokyo and Ghent.

The quality is not perfect, although some of this lies with the show itself as it mixes up stuff from across various periods in Prince’s career and culled from many different sources. There’s little point commenting on that part as it is to be expected with a documentary of this kind. The transfer to DVD is, again, a clean one and overall the sound is perfectly reasonable which also, as with the picture, varies a lot throughout the program, though this is no fault of DFB’s. If your a fan on the 96/97 era then this release is certainly worth picking up for the quality alone (even if the concert isn’t that great) and for others, the MTV segment is definitely worth checking out and not your usual ‘best of’ fair.