Beatles Video:

		List Price: $24.99		Label: Koch Vision Salesrank: 6713 Released: August 14, 2007
		Our Price: $13.53
		Used Price: $12.99
		MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
The inventor of the famous Les Paul guitar talks candidly about his life and achievements in this documentary.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MUSIC DVD/CONCERTS Rating: NR UPC: 741952643296 Manufacturer No: KOC-DV6432

Les Paul - Chasing Sound Reviews:
Not just a PBS movie
2008-07-16 - I was very fortunate this June to be able to see Les on his 93rd birthday at the Iridium. It was a once in a lifetime event. I had already seen the movie last Fall on PBS and had videotaped it off the air. After seeing him in NY, I decided to purchase the DVD because of the "extras" on it.
I'm SO glad I did! Besides the TV clips, photos and other goodies, there is a section from his 90th birthday at Iridium. This is a keepsake as it was just like the night I was there. In addition, I was floored with the expertise of the video shoot. It is flawless. To be able to capture the video in such a small club, make it glossy yet make the viewer feel like they're right there is not an easy task. The audio is absolute perfection.
I would not be surprised if Les himself had the final word on this mix. When I left the Iridium that night, I grabbed a brochure on my way out. The next day I read it and found that the "Meyer sound system" in the club was conceived by Les! I'm an audiophile and former Chief Engineer for several 50KW stations. When I sat down in the club and heard the sound, I knew then that like me, Les is a perfectionist.

You will really enjoy this DVD. I give it 5 stars. Go see him live.
He's there every Monday night. You won't be disappointed.

Les Paul Fans Gotta Have This!
2008-06-29 - This is a great piece for any Les Paul fan and guitar enthusiast! It goes to the Iridium in NY, his home in NJ, shows much of the original equipment he invented, the junker Lincoln in his driveway and Les is just an absolute hoot for a 90 year old guy (93 now). I've met him on 2 occassions and it was definately a huge experience! Get to NYC and go to the Iridium Jazz Club and see him for yourself!

Les Paul, Sound Pioneer, Still Kicking
2008-05-09 - At the occasion of Les Paul's 90th birthday, the filmmakers chronicle not just the fascinating life of the inventor of the hardbody electric guitar and a slew of music technologies, but the life of American music throughout most of the 20th century.

We first meet the mischievous and questing Les Polsfuss from Wauskeshaw, Wisconsin as he takes his mom's phone and radio to amplify himself for local performances. We follow him through his earliest country/hillbilly music phase through his baptism into the Chicago Jazz scene, and off from there to California and New York. Les on his early on-stage schooling by his great contemporaries: "Charlie [Christian, in Harlem] just nailed me right to the wall. I got beat by everybody. And rightfully so. And that's why I learned. I got the privilege to play with the all greats in their prime." Along the way, many of the personalities incidental to American music pop in for well-produced commentary. I found Les' relationship with one-time wife Mary Ford and his partnership with Chet Atkins to be among the most heartwarming parts of the story.

The crafters of the excellent documentary also take full advantage of the music of the era as well as film, video and stills. This has got to be the definitive film story of the life of this American original, Les Paul, and is a very good companion to other great American music histories.

What a life!
2008-04-30 - This is a fabulous biography of an amazing man. This is a must see for any guitarist. Les Paul was a great guitar player that perhaps does not get enough credit as such because of his choice to make a living rather than just make music, as many of his jazz contemporaries did. Not content or more likely not capable of being satisfied just being a world class musician, he was also one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar as well as multi-track recording. He is also the namesake of one of the most successful guitars of all time, Gibson's Les Paul. At 90 plus years old, he is still playing weekly concerts at his night club in Manhattan.

The director, John Paulson has done an excellent job compiling and editing footage from decades of TV shows and movies featuring Mr. Paul as well as many interviews of the man himself and many of his legion admirers. Anyone watching this movie is sure to wind up feeling like a slacker in comparison to the talented workaholic that is Les Paul. Highly recommended.



A wonderful documentary on a seminal figure in music
2008-04-19 - I was amazed at how much about Les Paul I learned from this documentary. I thought I was pretty knowledgeable, since I have a couple of Les Paul and Mary Ford albums. I was completely unaware how long Les had been active as a professional musician before that. I vaguely knew that he had played a fair bit for Bing Crosby, but not much more than that. And of course I was aware of how crucial he had been for the development of recording techniques. Many regard Tom Dowd as perhaps the most important recording engineer of the past half century, but he was quite upfront that while he took recording technology to the levels that made the recordings of the fifties and sixties and beyond possible, he became aware of the possibilities of the technology from the pioneering work of Les Paul.

Although much of the documentary focuses on a recent concert by the Les Paul Trio, fronted by Les shortly after his ninetieth birthday (the man has been a professional musician for over seventy years!), there is a wonderful amount of vintage or archival footage, photos of Les playing guitar with Art Tatum, or footage with Bing Crosby. As I said, I was amazed at how much he had accomplished before meeting Mary Ford. But the bits with Mary Ford were exceptionally enjoyable. I personally think that female pop singing has in recent decades gone completely into the toilet. I blame Whitney Houston, partly just to have someone to blame but partly because she was one of the singers to popularize taking a syllable and using 6 or 7 notes to express it. Or as one of the commentators in this documentary might express it, she popularized "bending" the notes. I am, on the other hand, vastly more impressed by purer singers, who can sing a note without the use of needless artifice, and sing in clear, undiluted tones. Linda Thompson is a singer of this type. So was Sandy Denny. And Mary Ford certainly was. Her voice is so lovely that she doesn't have to use vocal tricks to make what she is singing interesting.

The film features a host of really interesting commentators, from music authorities like Gary Giddens to friends to fellow musicians. Some of them are thrown in simply because they are prominent, even though they have little interesting to say, but several definitely enlighten the topics under discussion.

I was a bit surprised that the documentary held off so long in dealing with the one thing about Les Paul that nearly everyone knows about: his Gibson guitar and how it came about. They do get to it, but only as the entire affair is beginning to come to a close. The documentary thus displays the three major ways that Les Paul has had an impact on modern music: 1) the pioneering of sound on sound recording; 2) the creation of the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which is still -- along with the Fender Stratocaster -- the most widely used solid body guitar by professional musicians; and 3) his own music, whether performed as part of the Les Paul Trio, with Mary Ford, or with someone else.

On top of all this, the documentary makes him seem like an extraordinarily nice man. I've seen him interviewed before (for instance, once on Conan O'Brien, where he presented Conan with his very own signature Les Paul guitar) and every time I've seen him he does indeed seem enormously likable. All in all, this is a fine documentary, celebrating the man, his music, and his enormous contributions to modern music.