Featured Release: Jason Aldean, Wide Open Live & More
Eagle Vision EV 30278-9
Format: DVD

Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Picture Quality
Overall Enjoyment

Thirty-two-year-old Jason Aldean has been kicking around Nashville since 1998, but his career has thrived since he signed with indie label Broken Bow Records in 2004. He’s had six top-ten hits on the country charts, and his CDs, Jason Aldean (2005), Relentless (2007), and Wide Open (2009), have sold briskly. Aldean’s father was a country music fan, and he took his son to concerts by Kenny Rogers, Larry Gatlin & the Gatlin Brothers, and Alabama. As a consequence, Aldean’s music is modern, rock-influenced, and commercial, but it’s filled with solid playing, good humor, and a canny knowledge of how to reach his audience, as shown in the lyrics from his first hit, "Hicktown":

Well you can see the neighbor's butt crack nailing on his shingles
And his woman’s smokin’ Pall Malls watchin’ Laura Ingalls
And Granny’s gettin’ lit, she’s headin’ out to bingo
Yeah my buddies and me are goin’ muddin’ down on Blue Hole Road

Wide Open Live is a film of Aldean’s March 6, 2009, performance at the Knoxville Coliseum. It’s a huge room, and Aldean’s show is scaled to an arena, with lots of flashing lights, rear projection, and a big sound. He and his hard-hitting band do a 60-minute set that includes selections from all three of Aldean’s discs. The two guitarists, Kurt Allison and Mike Frey, generate a lot of energy, and Aldean is skilled at reaching out to a large crowd and pulling it into his music. It’s his show, but his band gets plenty of room to show off, including the drummer, whose three-minute feature mid-way through the show is brief enough to be enjoyable and entertaining. All five musicians sport hefty wallet chains as a fairly obvious appeal to their working class audience, but Aldean has a genuine rapport with the crowd and they respond with enthusiasm.

Most of Aldean’s songs here have a strong rock feel, even "Johnny Cash," which doesn’t show much of Cash’s influence. "Big Green Tractor," "Amarillo Sky," and many other tracks have guitar solos that sound more like Lynard Skynard or the Allman Brothers Band than traditional country music, and the chord progressions to "You’re the Love I Wanna Be In" and "Hicktown" could have been lifted from AC/DC. Like most of the current generation of country performers, Aldean knows that his fans, like him, were weaned on rock as much as country, and he’s happy to make them feel at home.

The DVD is presented in very clean 16:9 widescreen and offers three audio options: Dolby Digital stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1, and DTS. I found the DTS to be the cleanest and most spacious sound overall, while the other formats sounded a bit compressed. The director, Ivan Dudynsky, captures the energy of Aldean’s shows, and the DVD is very well edited. A 20-minute bonus looks at Aldean and his band on tour.

. . . Joseph Taylor

Note: The concert is also available on Blu-ray -- the picture is 1080p widescreen, and the sound formats are PCM stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1, and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1.