Wolfgang's Big Night Out

Album review

On this disc the Brian Setzer Orchestra, which has carried the "orchestra" designation for a long time, plays treatments of familiar classical tunes. The question that faces this kind of enterprise is "why?" -- why try to improve on time-tested melodies, or on Setzer's polished, classicizing brand of rockabilly, which were doing well to begin with? Something unexpected has to be added to keep things form falling into A Fifth of Beethoven territory. The good news is that Setzer succeeds on this score -- the album has so many surprises that it feels a bit overstuffed at times, but it's never dull in the slightest. Setzer does something different with each tune he adopts. Where you might expect him to play it straight, he takes the music in a completely unexpected direction (if you were wondering how the 1812 Overture might be turned into a rumba, sample 1812 Overdrive, track 10). Where you might expect him to simply quote a few scraps of recognizable music, he (and a pair of other arrangers) offer a surprisingly detailed replication of the original -- Take the 5th diverges along the way from the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, eliminating the development section to give Setzer space for a guitar solo but keeping most of the exposition's major moves. What's most surprising is that much of the album works as rockabilly or jump blues. The Hall of the Mountain King section from Grieg's Peer Gynt gets words ("I don't need no foreign car, movie star, new guitar -- a jukebox in a funky bar, and one more night with you") in "One More Night with You," track 3. The only other piece with text is "Honey Man," track 4 -- from Flight of the Bumblebee, which it would have been easy for Setzer to play in a relatively straight transcription. Instead he has female backup singers intoning the likes of "Buzz Buzz, oh yes, the Honey Man is here!" It sounds tacky, but the whole thing is pulled off with such precision and energy that it's hard to resist, and the varied treatment of the original material suggests familiarity on Setzer's part with some of the rich vocabulary of quotation found in more aesthetically oriented jazz. A few tracks seem contrived, but even Here Comes the Broad could work for the right kind of irreverent wedding. Great fun from one of the few musicians able to keep a 17-piece band busy these days.

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