Brian Setzer Orchestra

Brian Setzer has made a career of bucking trends, going against the grain, ignoring popular culture, discarding rational thought, and, all the while, blowing people away. In a pop music era dominated by twenty-something contest winners and angst-ridden suburban kids, his latest project couldn't be any further removed from the mainstream. Recording centuries-old music with his 18-piece Rockin' Big Band and enlisting the help of a long-retired octogenarian, Setzer has achieved what is surely his finest musical hour with his upcoming Surfdog Records release, "Wolfgang's Big Night Out."

As a teenager, Brian Setzer drew inspiration from 50's rockabilly, fused it with new wave punk, and created a phenomenon with his band Stray Cats. During the 1990's (when grunge ruled the charts), he assembled his monstrous big band complete with a 13-piece horn section that ignited an international modern swing explosion, sold millions of albums, and racked up 3 Grammy wins. If that wasn't enough, Setzer found tremendous success in redefining Christmas music for a generation desperately desiring something new and exciting around the holidays.

Now in 2007, a most unlikely concept has resulted in his most profound work yet. Reaching back 300 years, Brian has taken on the daunting task of reinventing and revitalizing the world's greatest melodies of all time. We're talkin' Mozart.... Beethoven.... Tchaikovsky.... Mendelssohn...... all the greats. It's one thing to do straight versions of these timeless classics, staying true to the original arrangements, but that would be too easy. The challenge proved to be in taking these melodies that everybody on the planet is intimately familiar with, coming up with completely new parts, add a smokin' hot guitar, and pray that it all makes sense!

The opening bars of "Take The 5th", a rollicking and swinging adaptation of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, lay all fears to rest. As the album progresses through its 12 incredibly executed tracks, with Setzer taking on such masterpieces as "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," "The 1812 Overture," "The Blue Danube," and "The William Tell Overture," you soon realize that this counter-intuitive mix of disparate musical styles was somehow always meant to be. While the album is predominantly instrumental, there are two excellent standout vocal tracks, "One More Night With You" (based on Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King") and "Honey Man" (based on Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee"), which round out the collection nicely.

Asked about the new arrangements, Setzer laughs, "This isn't kid stuff. It's a lot of fun to listen to, but the music is incredibly complex. You've got plus-9 and flat-5 chords flying around with passing tones and multiple key changes within a single section. It's hard to keep up!" Fortunately, he's got the band and the chops to do just that.

How do you bring an idea like this from conception to completion? "The first step," says Setzer "is to write down the names of every piece of music that comes to mind. Then the filtering begins. You figure out which of these epics can be broken down into melodic sections that will fit within a modern song structure that's fun and rocks. Once I've got a song I think I can work with, I need to come up with original parts that not only frame the classic melody in a new way, but can also stand up and hold its own, musically." No easy feat when you're dealing with music that has survived hundreds of years and has been ingrained into our very being.