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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
