Lovable lunatics\u00a0— what can you do but love them?<\/p>\n
And what can you call it but inspired lunacy when MC Retro himself, Brian Setzer, takes a series of classical, well, classics, and puts them through his personal musical Wayback Machine?<\/p>\n
Kids like me who still remember with shameful delight what disco did to Ludwig (\u201cA Fifth Of Beethoven\u201d) rejoice right off the bat as Setzer and his crack ensemble of big band swingers take Beethoven\u2019s 5th — the \u201cSmoke On The Water\u201d of classical music — and turn it inside out, giving it Rat Pack horns-and-cymbals swing, with a little rockabilly guitar solo thrown in the middle.<\/p>\n
The title track\u00a0— an adaptation of Mozart\u2019s \u201cEine Kleine Nachtmusik\u201d (\u201cA Little Night Music\u201d) — swings with restraint in the opening bars, as Setzer runs through the main theme once on guitar before handing it off to the muted trumpets, who in turn hand it off to the saxes and flutes before the full band kicks in.\u00a0 Next up, Setzer takes the ascending melody line of Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s frenetic \u201cFlight Of The Bumblebee\u201d and turns it into a Carl Perkins shred-fest while the horns and female backing vocals throw a party around a silly, winking lyric about a \u201c Further along, Rossini\u2019s \u201cWilliam Tell Overture\u201d is transformed into \u201cSwingin\u2019 Willie\u201d to dynamic effect.\u00a0 And before you\u2019re done, Setzer & Co. have performed similar musical extreme makeovers on Wagner, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and even Strauss, whose \u201cBlue Danube\u201d is rather sassily renamed \u201cSome River In Europe.\u201d\u00a0 But then, this entire album is sassy\u00a0— that\u2019s kind of the point.<\/p>\n I\u2019m honestly not sure how many listens this one will demand — it\u2019s more or less a novelty and I\u2019m fairly confident its spell will wear off sooner rather than later — but for a few listens at least, it\u2019s a giddy, swingin\u2019 hoot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8104],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-40632","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-brian-setzer-orchestra","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40632"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40632"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}