Volume 1 kicks off with guitarist/vocalist Bruce McDaniel belting Lennon and McCartney’s “ Good Morning, Good Morning” (Palermo obsessives will notice that the track opens with a bleating goat, which is rumored to be the same creature heard at the end of One Child Left Behind…how’s that for continuity?) The Beatles provide the widest thread running through the project, including an instrumental version of “ Eleanor Rigby” that’s a tour de force by violinist Katie Jacoby (who also tears up King Crimson’s prog rock masterpiece “ Larks’ Tongue in Aspic, Part 2”). The first installments in what he hopes to be an ongoing project (he is currently working on an Un-American Songbook, Volume 3), these two volumes give a whole new meaning to Swinging London. Featuring largely the same stellar cast of players as last year’s gloriously eclectic One Child Left Behind, the 18-piece EPBB lovingly reinvents songs famous and obscure, leaving them readily recognizable and utterly transformed. His fifth project for the label, The Great Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2 is a love letter to the rockers who ruled the AM and FM airwaves in the 1960s via successive waves of the British Invasion.
The New Jersey saxophonist, composer and arranger is best known for his celebrated performances interpreting the ingenious compositions of Frank Zappa, an extensive body of work documented on previous Cuneiform albums such as 2006’s Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance and 2009’s Eddy Loves Frank. Crazy times call for outrageous music, and few jazz ensembles are better prepared to meet the surreality of this reality-TV-era than the antic and epically creative Ed Palermo Big Band.
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