The Bassoon Brothers

We used to sit around making stuff like this up, drawing bogus album covers of bassoon players in porkpie hats and RayBans with stickers that read: “Contains the hit ‘Purple Haze,’ played on a bassoon through a wah-wah.” But 21st-century surrealism is a moot point—if you can’t tell if a headline originated with CNN or The Onion, what’s the problem with rounding up three bassoons and a contrabassoon from the Oregon Symphony and putting them in the studio with an accordion player to graft “Louie Louie” onto “Beer Barrel Polka”? What’s remarkable is that this is the second album from these folks, and that they’ve been around since 1985. And aside from the inherent kitsch of mixing Hendrix, the Beatles and Smokey Robinson with Rodgers & Hart, Rota, Sondheim and Gilbert & Sullivan with Bizet, Gounod and Sibelius, these bassoonists, technically, can’t be faulted. Even for mangling “Lady in Spain.”