Ike Turner

Ike Turner made a comeback in 2001 with the release of his album Here and Now, and this video shows him back on-stage for a 69-minute show at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Hague the following year, fronting a nine-member edition of his backup band, once again dubbed the Kings of Rhythm, as it was in the 1950s before the onset of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. For much of the concert, Turner also seems to have turned the clock back to the years before Tina Turner, sitting center stage at an electric piano and sometimes breaking out an electric guitar as he takes the band through versions of boogie-woogie, jump blues, R&B, and soul standards. His ex-wife is referred to in the amended lyrics to "Five Long Years," which is extended with the refrain, "I worked 18 years for one woman/She had the nerve to kick me out -- and do a movie!" Three-fifths of the way through the show, Turner (having admitted to being a senior citizen) stands up to show off some of his whammy bar guitar pyrotechnics on "Ike's Theme" and the country-tinged band spotlight "Steel Guitar Rag," then brings on singer Audrey Madison, who starts out with Melissa Etheridge's "I'm the Only One" and then approximates some of the late-'60s/early-'70s Ike & Tina Turner hits such as "Proud Mary" to bring the show to a lively close. The concert isn't nearly as exciting as shows by the old revue, but it gives a good sense of the breadth of Turner's career, not only as the man behind Tina Turner, but also as the man who introduced "Rocket 88," and thus was a rock & roll progenitor. The DVD's extras add another 72 minutes of content, including a 19-minute collage of performances, interviews (some of them with Turner in jail), and photographs called "The Early Years" even though it covers the artist's entire career; excerpts from concerts held in Switzerland in 1999 (with a new batch of Ikettes) and in Paris in 2002; and coverage of Turner's NARAS Heroes Award ceremony in Memphis in 2004, with interview footage of B.B. King, Sam Phillips, and Little Milton. ~ William Ruhlmann­, All Music Guide