Brian Setzer News!

Wolfgang's Big Night Out" Released Today- Tuesday, September 25th!

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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.

"Once I've got a road map of where I think the song should go," Brian continues "we sit down and write out all of the different parts that each musician has to play in order to get that BSO sound." When it comes to writing out the arrangements and horn charts for the big band, Brian typically does a lot of the heavy lifting. This time around, however, a crazy idea sparked. "On one of my Christmas albums," he recalls, "we did a version of 'The Nutcracker Suite' that was done back in the 50's by Les Brown and His Band of Renown. It gave me a thought: 'wouldn't it be cool if we could get the guy who wrote that chart to write some of this classical stuff?!'" Great idea Brian, but that was over 50 years ago! Is the guy even around anymore?

About Brian Setzer:

How did this onetime Long Island punkabilly kid rise to international fame? Easy: hard work, talent, and the same never-say-die attitude that has always stood him out from the crowd. As an underage club crasher, Setzer gave equal time to Manhattan's swank jazz clubs and downtown rock dives. From these diverse experiences he emerged with a unique look, something like a tangle of Eddie Cochran and Sid Vicious after a motorcycle wreck, and a sound unlike any heard before. By combining vintage rockabilly with the attitude of modern punk and the polish of postbop jazz, Setzer staked out his territory and multiplied his creative options.

His first step was to move to England and unleash the Stray Cats, whose ferocious shows shot them to international prominence. Three Top Ten singles powered their first album, Built for Speed, to the top of the charts. And that was just the beginning: When the Cats scattered, Setzer pursued his own projects, with collaborators as diverse as the ultimate artist/producer, Phil Ramone, and the conscience of the Clash, Joe Strummer. He tested the waters of Texas blues and Rat Pack jive. Along the way he sold millions of records, was immortalized as a character on "The Simpsons," had a series of actual casino chips bearing his name, was bestowed the honor of playing for the President of the United States at the White House, and built a reputation as one of the world's most respected guitarists – he even supervised the launch of his own series of Gretsch "Brian Setzer Model" signature guitars, including last year's new "Black Phoenix" model. Yet even with his Gretsch affiliation, the Gibson guitar company has singled him out for a prestigious Orville H. Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award.

More recently, he was asked to preside over the induction of Chet Atkins into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, in the coming months, he'll be seen every week performing the intro for MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL.

Even with all that he has achieved, the Brian Setzer Orchestra was and remains his glory: an ensemble of world-class musicians, playing state-of-the-art charts, and blowing away jazz hipsters as well as families out for a fun night. Their sound, as groundbreaking as the rockabilly revival that Setzer had launched previously with the Stray Cats, earned three Grammy Awards, two for Best Pop Instrumental Performance ("Sleepwalk," from the multi-platinum The Dirty Boogie in 1998 and "Caravan," from VaVoom, in 2000) and one for Best Pop Performance ("Jump, Jive an' Wail," also from The Dirty Boogie, 1998). Critics, too, were dazzled by this unprecedented fusion of big-band swing and rock swagger: After staggering home from a BSO show in December 2003, a journalist declared, "The show was more than an extravaganza. It was a party – in every sense of the word.