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I hap­pened upon this record at a thrift shop in Madi­son. It was in the Easy Lis­ten­ing (slash things-that-defy-categorization) bin. The photo of Civil War brass play­ers on the front caught my eye. Then, I noticed the track list: “Hey Jude,” “Spin­ning Wheel,” “Light My Fire,” “Michelle,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feel­ing,” etc. Those tunes in com­bi­na­tion with the photo and the name of the group con­vinced me to add the record to my stack. I don’t think I really looked at the back of the album until I got home. The back has a pic­ture of some Union offi­cers, and a cou­ple of para­graphs of com­plete B.S. that doesn’t give much of any real infor­ma­tion about the disc’s con­tents or the musi­cians who appear on it.

The one bit of real infor­ma­tion — which would itself have been enough for me to buy the disc — is that one mem­ber of the group plays a con­tra­bass sax­o­phone. This beast of the sax fam­ily (pho­tos here, here, and here) is pitched in E-flat, one octave below the bari­tone sax­o­phone (and two octaves below the famil­iar alto). Here, the con­tra is part of an mix of instru­ments — trum­pet, clar­inet, banjo, trom­bone, string bass, Ham­mond organ, accor­dion, and drums that cre­ate sort of a psuedo-neo-Dixieland band. The whole record is quite strange, but most of it falls squarely into the good/funny-weird cat­e­gory. Here’s my favorite track from the disc, one that promi­nently fea­tures the mas­sive con­tra­bass sax:

Lis­ten to The Bur­bank Phil­har­monic — These Boots Were Made for Walking