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This is another gem I picked up at St. Vinny’s in Madi­son. The cover alone, with its stereo­typ­i­cal Wag­ner­ian Valkyrie with an old-style conga, was worth the pur­chase. But the record turns out to be pretty good (read: delight­fully cheesy), too. Edmundo Ros ( who I hadn’t heard of before pick­ing up this record) was born in Trinidad to Venezue­lan and Scot­tish par­ents, and has spent the bulk of his career in Britain. From 1940 to the mid 90s, he led a vari­ety of Latin jazz bands based in Lon­don, toured the world, and recorded exten­sively. He retired to Spain in 1994, was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and just turned 100 a cou­ple of weeks ago.

Hav­ing not heard any of his other albums, I’m not sure whether this level of cheese is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of or anom­alous within his out­put. In any case, it’s pretty fun. Ros and his Orches­tra tackle Car­men, Rigo­letto, La Travi­ata, The Bar­ber of Seville, The Mar­riage of Figaro, and even Lohen­grin, among oth­ers. My favorite cut is their treat­ment of the “Toreador’s Song” from Car­men:

Lis­ten to Edmundo Ros and His Orches­tra — The Toreador’s Song

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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