You Know I'm Right In Cali

A LONG STORY MADE SHORT:
Ecomundo 92 was originally planned as an event aimed at awakening ecological awareness. During a couple of weeks the summit would present forums, lectures, and workshops in Cali and Bogotá (Colombia).
However, due to lack of experience, selfish interests, and problems between the organizers, the activities in Bogotá were cancelled. And only the events in Cali took place in part.
The last day of Ecomundo a special concert was offered. The list of performers included Kool and the Gang, Juliet Roberts, Phil Manzanera, Chucho Merchán (who was the contact between the organizers of Ecomundo and the British musicians), David Gilmour, Roger Daltrey and some Latin-American rock bands.
Despite the fact that the whole event bordered disaster, the concert was rescued by the great charisma and loving attitude of the musicians who performed on that infamous night of December 4th, 1992 in front of barely 2.000 people.
Soon the event was forgotten, and erased from the memory of many. It became almost a myth, and David Gilmour’s only live performance in South America was often mistaken with the Colombian Volcano Appeal Charity Concert organized by Chucho Merchán at the Royal Albert Hall six years before to help the survivors of 1985’s Armero’s tragedy.
But that Cali concert was not forgotten by the few people who went to see those great stars that night. In 2006 "Saperoco" (aka "Locombiano" in the Chilean Pink Floyd Community) started a deep research which led him two years later to find the tapes of a short documentary about the concert.
Some time later, and after contacting many people involved with the production of the documentary, Saperoco was finally able to contact the original editor/archivist of the tapes of the complete concert.
The concert was originally filmed using 4 Betacam professional cameras. However, some months after the disastrous event, the owners of the tapes decided they were not useful and proceeded to erase them.
The anonymous archivist had the good judgment to make a VHS backup copy of Gilmour’s and Daltrey’s performances from the tapes of the stage front camera before erasing them.
As a result it is the only surviving copy of the material recorded that night. Unfortunately, no backup copies of the tapes from the other 3 cameras were made. The rest of the show was also discarded. Since 1993 all the original tapes are lost forever.
The only VHS copy was carelessly kept for many years and it started to degrade. At some point in 2004 the owner of the tape decided to transfer it to DVD before trashing the VHS.
That DVD was the one Saperoco was able to track and rescue in December 2008
After that, it was only a matter of time for this release to be done. Now it’s in your hands for you to enjoy.

THE CONCERT
The original video presents 6 video cuts. Probably where cassettes were replaced, or most possibly they are the evidence of segments that were cut at the time of the first Betacam-to-VHS transfer to cut out dead time between songs and technical problems. Despite this awful edition, David Gilmour’s performance is shown in is entirety, followed by Roger Daltrey’s performance where Gilmour plays the guitar in 5 songs. According to memories of people who attended the concert, the song list from this video is the same they remember, so no song was left out.
The only manipulation made to the video was a colour phase correcting filter to heal an annoying and terrible color bleeding. No cuts or further edition was made.
The person who made the Betacam-VHS transfer assures the sound was taken directly from the mixing desk. Although we are not 100% sure about it, some credit might be given to this claim, since there are some audible glitches, feedback, channel muting, and open/close microphones that may come only from the mixing desk handling.
Yet, since the audio also offers noticeable audience sound, that statement may not be true, and possibly the audio was edited using two different sources: the soundboard mix and an audience recording of the camera.
There were several sound miscues (sometimes up to 2 seconds) in the original DVD probably due to the hastily first transfer. After extracting the audio and correcting the speed in the problematic points, it is now fully synchronized.
When the original VHS was transferred to DVD in 2004, the video was encoded at a nice 8.000kbs, but the audio was only encoded at Dolby Stereo / 192 Kbs. It surely was not the intention to make a high quality transfer in terms of audio encoding. Since the original VHS is now lost, it is impossible to get a better audio transfer. The original audio is full of hissing, feedback, noise, echo, and all the possible defects you can name. No attempt was made to de-hiss, normalize or equalize the audio, or improving it in any other way apart from the speed correction. For this DVD the audio was kept at its original Dolby Stereo 2.0 / 192 kbps rate.
According to the archivist there never was a soundboard recording of this concert because the sound was recorded directly into the video tape of the front stage camera, which is the one that survived through transfers. Since we haven’t heard news of any audio recording (whether soundboard or audience) of that specific show it is possible that such statement is true. However, no last word has been said.

THE DOCUMENTARY
On January 1993 Universidad del Valle broadcasted a 27-minute documentary about the Ecomundo concert. It was broadcasted only once through a regional channel. Since then, it was kept at the university’s archives.
The video consists of interviews with some of the musicians, and footage of the sound checks. At the very end of the documentary you can see a 4-camera edition of "Run Like Hell".
This documentary was transferred directly from the original U-matic tape into this DVD.

EXTRAS
A 2007 interview with Chucho Merchán is included. It offers an insight about his musical career, his experiences with the musicians he’s played with, and his non-profit foundation to help the poor.
A short TV interview and a bass jam with Guy Pratt (c.1990) is also included.
There is also a nice TV ad from HBO PLUS (2008) announcing its broadcast of "Remember That Night".

Added:  28.09.2009