I recently heard Also Sprach Zarathustra by Deodato, thought it was excellent, and it got me wondering whether there is musch out there in the way of classical music redone with modern instruments and rhythms.
Any suggestions?
You’d probably like this CD of Brian Setzer’s swing band doing classics
Called Wolfgang’s Night Out
http://www.amazon.com/Wolfgangs-Night-Brian-Setzer-Orchestra/dp/B000U05ITS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1250402209&sr=1-2
Jacques Loussier Trio, Play Bach Jazz
Jethro Tull’s Bourree
Clarinetist Don Byron does a riff on a Nutcracker piece with “Bounce of the Sugar Plum Fairies”.
Duke Ellington’s takes on the Nutcracker and Peer Gynt suites swing like hell.
Miles Davis & Gil Evans’s reworking of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is mind-blowing.
Don’t know whether I’d really call it “jazz”, but Freddy Martin’s orchestra used to do big band arrangements of classical pieces. One of his biggest hits was “Tonight We Love”, an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto in B flat.
The Swingle Singers performed jazzed versions of Bach and others. Jazz Sebastian Bach was their first album. Sample them on Amazon. Amazon.com : swingle singers
You’ve all probably heard it, but I can’t pass up the chance to mention Bourée by Jethro Tull.
Bach, played by a jazzy (and eventually manic) flute, with a very cool bass progression.
Didn’t we recently have another thread on this?
Anyway . . . I have a CD called “Beethoven Wrote It . . . But It Swings!” 23 tracks of classical pieces interpreted by jazz orchestras of the '30s and '40s. (The title track is by Dolly Dawn and Her Dawn Patrol.)
I’ve not heard much of it, but Claude Bolling is a flutist who made a career of doing jazz arrangements of classical pieces.
Hubert Laws (another jazz flutist) has done some as well.
Tomita did a wholly electronic version of Holst’s The Planets in the early days of the synthesiser. (Several rock musicians have done arrangements of different movements, also.)
Deodato has covered Pavanne and Rites of Spring as well as Zarathustra.
Not only that, but, from the same CD (Bug Music), “The Quintet Does Carmen” and “Charley’s Prelude,” which I eventually realized was Chopin’s “Prelude in E-Minor” (Op.28 No. 4).
Oh yeah. His The Rite of Spring album–like the Deodato, a Creed Taylor production–is quite bitchen, consisting entirely of compositions by Stravinsky (obviously), Fauré, Debussy, and Bach.
If you want something really weird, there’s an arrangement of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for electric guitar, electric bass and drums: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/stravinsky
Many parts sound more like fusion jazz than rock.
Glenn Miller recorded Song of the Volga Boatmen.
Lennie Tristano recorded a few Bach fugues, and was known to play similar pieces in live performance.
I’ve been distracted by some other things from this thread, but I do thank you all for your replies.
This is exactly what I asked for, but after listening to some of the tracks, not what I really want. It’s not exactly a parody, but more of a, er, lighthearted take on the music. I want music that is a bit more faithful to the tone of the original.
I just got a really nice new set of earbuds for my iPod, and it’s almost like hearing some of my music for the first time, and I’m inspired to do some more listening. So I will take some time at Rhapsody to listen to more of your suggestions tonight. I hope I can find most there and listen to them in their entirety.
Maybe a tall order, since what the original composer and the jazz arranger were hoping to each evoke with the same song are entierly different. The jazz version either replaces the original’s schmaltz with cool sophistication, or flippantly sucks out its soul, according to ones tastes.
I understand what you’re saying, and that’s usually the case, but it isn’t necessarily so. I just heard another Deodato piece for the first time, Rhapsody in Blue, that seem to me to have more… well I’m not sure what you call it, kinship? with the original. IIRC, this original was Gershwin, and not exactly what I think of when I think of classical music.
Maybe what I’m talking about is the two pieces evoking a similar emotional response from the listener. With the Brian Setzer tracks, my reaction was, “Yeah, I recognize the melody from an older piece. That’s kind of fun. It’s kind of cute.” But with Deodato’s Zarathustra piece, I felt a sense of boldness and power that I also sensed from from the original. Perhaps that was reinforced by how the original was interpreted in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well. Really hard for me to say, because it’s so hard to nail down how or why a particular emotion gets associated with a particular experience.
Oh, yes, and of the the two examples you provided, I see the Tommy Dorsey version as pretty much what Brian Setzer was doing, actually going further afield than Setzer did. Setzer stuck a little closer to the melodies than Dorsey, but in both cases they music was clearly adapted for a swing band.
Deodato perhaps had a different set of priorities becaue they were playing for a listening, rather than a dancing, audience.
I dunno, I’m kind of making this up as I go, as I have no background at all in music history or music theory. I’m probably doing a better analysis of my own emotional states than I am of the music under discussion.