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Ever since Brian Setzer of Local 47 (Los Angeles) first burst onto the scene in the early 1980s with his band Stray Cats, his music has been hard to categorize. Bucking trends as readily as he sets new ones, the Long Island native has successfully combined rockabilly with punk and breathed new life into American swing and big band music. In the '90s he formed the Brian Setzer Orchestra; the group scored a hit with the song "Jump Jive An'Wail" and went on to win three Grammy Awards.
On September 25 the orchestra released their seventh album, Wolfgang's Big Night Out, a 12-song collection of classical compositions adapted and performed in Setzer's signature big band style. The album is ambitious, unusual, and thoroughly entertaining, proving that even centuries later, everything old really is new again.
"I sit with my guitar and just noodle around all the time," Setzer says, recalling his first inspiration for the album. "One day I started to play 'Blue Danube'; I don't know why. It sounded pretty good, so I played it for my wife and she said, 'That sounds great. What are you going to do with it?' And I said, 'I'm going to put a guitar under it!' I ended up taking it into the recording studio and putting two more guitars under it, and it sounded really good, so I took it to my manager who said, 'You have to write a chart!' And I thought oh no, here we go again! A friend and I worked on a chart for it, and it just grew from there."
Setzer started by making a list of every great classical composition he could think of, and then began a filtering process, looking for those that could be broken down into melodic sections or could fit into a modern song structure. He knew, though, that he wanted to stick to the most well-known pieces, those songs that every one of us knows and recognizes. "It was hard to decide, because they were all incredible pieces," he says. "But I wasn't going to delve into obscure Rachmaninoff or anything like...