Concert for George

The concert does a really nice job at both highlighting George's musical legacy and showing who he was as a person. Ravi Shankar's daughter played an Indian prayer, one of Shankar's own compositions, and one of George's tunes to demonstrate his spiritual side. Then Monty Python got up and did a few of their numbers to demonstrate George's comical side. Finally Eric Clapton comes in with a band of George's friends (including Paul, Ringo, Billy Preston, Gary Booker, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, his son Dhani and plenty of other guys well known to George enthusiasts) and goes through George's big hits, both solo and with The Beatles (as well as a Wilburys song thrown in there.) Bob Dylan, who was present at The Concert For Bangladesh, is conspicuously absent here (he was on tour at the time.)

The band might be five times the size it needs to be, but it's excusable because they're there to pay tribute to their friend. While some of the songs are really great arrangements ("Something" and "Horse To The Water" come to mind,) some are surprising bad ("Taxman" just sounds whiny for some reason.) Most of it though is okay and they at least piqued my interested in Harrison enough to get me to dive into the rest of his records.

The final song, which has never not made me cry, is a cover of "I'll See You In My Dreams" done by Joe Brown on ukulele (showing another side of George Harrison, the ukulele strumming, standards-loving musicians' musician.) It was a special event and the concert film is shot quite beautifully.