for a good few years i’ve been planning a compilation of interpretations of classical tunes by jazz and rock artists, mainly inspired by the fantastic jacques loussier [jacques at wiki-p],

but also by the fabulous moe koffman, koffman was a classically trained fusion meister ‘second only to oscar peterson’ (big talk!) in his native canada, i found his ‘four seasons in rock’ at a car booter about 10 years ago, since then i’ve had to listen to a whole lot of truly awful easy takes on the four seasons

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it reminds me heavily of the creed taylor sound bumped by deodato in his fantastic ‘also sprach zarathustra’, featured to great effect in the soundtrack of the peter sellers film ‘being there’, the sequence where he walks out of the house down into ‘the ghetto’ is pungent to say the least..

a fabulous clip, but loses a lot of the depth for the absence of the preceeding 15 or so minutes.. so just go check the film yeah..

bach has always been popular with the jazz crowd, possibly due to his outrageous completeness in rinsing out a tune, fans of mathematics may like to check out ‘godel, escher, bach’ at this point, a fantastic book about maths (and everything else, (and no i haven’t read it all) {but} i especially liked his comments on levels of meaning) those of you who are still after some more classical fusion behaviour check this mofo by english double bass rudeboy johnny hawksworth, don’t know a great deal about Johnny Hawksworth but he used to hang with the library crowd and made quite a lot a record, there’s a lot of releases up on discogs, but i couldn’t find this one

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from the lp johann hawksworth bach, subtitled ‘baroque around the clock’ which is the best bit of wordplay we will encounter on this journey, it reminds me of the extraordinary saturday gigue by the roundtable, who were a bunch of early music types who obviously liked a bit of psychedelic soul jazz action on the side, heres a snatch of it, an old dan of mine, sie vulture, recently re-released it on his fine label, licorice soul,

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reminds me of those geezers focus, and while we’re on the subject of early music, here’s a curveball, a quirky little number, a whole album of baccarach covers in an ‘early music style’, whoever came up with this concept deserves a medallion of beef and a bottle of babycham.. casino royale, by the 18th Century Corporation from the lp Baccarach Baroque

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but my personal favourite of the whole lot has to be this music for pleasure relick of the bach classic ‘air’, this one is masterminded by uk soundtrack supremo alan moorhouse, the pure innocence and cheek of it still takes my trousers down, smells slightly of dave brubeck to me..

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in an attempt to round this off i’ll hit you up with this bach bastardisation by the lord of cosmic slop and his boys parliament, from their first proper (i believe) lp of psychedelic folk funk rock ‘osmium’

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those of you are glad it’s over should count themselves lucky that we didn’t get started on the steel band permutations i could have got onto…

next time, progtastic… but don’t hold yr breath…