Variety Orchestra

by Brian Woodbury
ReR and Some Phil Records, USA, 2004
Audio CD-ROM, 44'25", $12.00
ReR BW1 / Some Phil 7
Distributor’s website: http://somephil.com/.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Take a central group of very good jazz musicians that builds a solid scaffold for an orchestra consisting of a fiddle, hillbilly banjo, accordion, and steel guitar to stand on. Let them play tunes you-can't-quite-remember-where-you-heard-them-before and add some normal household voice. You will end up with a caricature of folk-jazz. Let Brian Woodbury arrange the scores for the same group, and the result will be a very delightful, entertaining, swinging CD full of surprises.

In eight tracks, Woodbury takes us from "the J Train" through "Venice, Italy" and "Jesus Christ Alrighty" to Shenandoah/Innsbruck. Each song has its own references to some variety of folk music, to some place or region or to some well know musical or some 40s or 50s popular hit. But none is quite what it seems. Brian Woodbury's variety orchestra plays very cleverly disguised post-sampled post-postmodernist pastiches with a lot of drive and even more pleasure. It is not simple music; even if at the surface, it sounds like something a beginner's orchestra would do. It reminds us of the Penguin Café Orchestra or Peter Vermeersch' Flat Earth Society with a tinge of Zappa.

Woodbury has been around at the New Tork downtown scene for some 11 years, and he feels equally at home in the theatre and pop music. He has studied with Pauline Oliveros.