ELVIS SCHOENBERG'S ORCHESTRE SURRÉAL: It's Alive!

Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestre Surréal

It's Alive!

© 2004 Gorkey Bark Music (669820100224)

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The Orchestre Surréal is a theatrical twenty-piece rock orchestra that blends Classic rock with classical, jazz, hip-hop, Country and just about everything else, and features two amazing vocalists: The Fabulous Miss Thing, and Dangerous Dan O'Callaghan,

tracks

1 These boots Are Made for Walking
2 Interlude
3 Live and Let Die
4 Interlude
5 Evil Ways
6 Interlude
7 Nessun Dorma
8 Interlude
9 Blue Suede Shoes
10 Interlude
11 Takin' Care Of Business
12 Interlude
13 Little Wing
14 Interlude
15 Jive Talking
16 Interlude
17 The Stomping Five

notes

MUSIC REVIEW
'Absurd' and more at Ford
By Richard S. Ginell, Special to The Times

review: L.A. Times Monday September 22, 2003

By day a mild-mannered musician and film composer, when Ross Wright gets anywhere near a podium, voila!, he becomes Elvis Schoenberg, fearlessly jumping boundaries of genre and taste in a single leap.

Not merely content to perform shotgun marriages between the likes of Wagner and Nancy Sinatra, Mussorgsky and Santana, etc., Wright (er, Elvis) took on a more ambitious task Friday night at the Ford Amphitheatre - a "book musical" of a sort called "Symphony of the Absurd!" It was, as Ed Sullivan would have said, "a really big shew" in which Wright incorporated many of his set pieces and some newer numbers into a hellzapoppin' revue, with an eclectic assortment of dancers, sexy girls, pulp novel narrations, lighting effects, dry ice. In other words, it was a real hoot.
The "storyline" - cooked up by "Dangerous" Dan O'Callaghan, the portly tenor who can also do cartwheels (shades of John Belushi) - was a slender thing, indeed: Elvis and his friends save the Earth from an invasion of space aliens. It was just a ruse to link several of Wright's musical contraptions into a reasonably flowing whole, and perhaps to get in a few political licks - with O'Callaghan deposing the current Chief Executive and running for office himself to the tune of the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'."

If anything, Wright's collages of this and that bring Frank Zappa to mind - the quick cuts between styles, the intricately difficult lines, the occasional jazz breaks. But Wright doesn't share Zappa's gleeful misanthropy; his lampooning seems more affectionate and respectful of his audience's love of pop culture. At one point, where "Blue Suede Shoes" is sung against a wacky 12-tone setting, the idiom literally could be called Elvis Schoenberg.

Much of this mayhem featured the vocals of the pink-platinum-haired chanteuse The Fabulous Miss Thing (Angela Carole Brown), whose delivery sometimes resembled that of Tina Turner and who also plays a mean theremin. The 22-piece Orchestre Surreal deftly handled any number of styles - with some good bebop breaks by the wind soloists.

reviews

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  • Different kinda wierd
    author: Jay Hersh

    Some of the cover songs on the CD are really good but there is a lot of other stuff on the CD that I don't care for

  • Thank you for carrying on what I started. You do it much better.
    author: Gene Hurwin, aka: Supreme Funster

    Hola my brotha' Well, well, well, based on your work, it looks as if I'm not dead! You have done excellent work, my brotha'. Keep it up. Gene

  • wow. Just.... wow. Every synapse I have left is twitching.

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