Dennis Blais: The Spaghetti Western Orchestra October 25, 2008

The Spaghetti Western Orchestra, directed and designed by Canadian Denis Blais, premiered in 2007 and was the sell-out hit of that year’s Montreal Jazz Festival. Featuring an outlaw gang of Australian comic maestros performing the music of iconic Italian “spaghetti western” composer Ennio Morricone, the show is “simply fantastic...a must-see,” according to The Age (Australia). Playing over 100 instruments, the “orchestra” is a quirky quintet of performers who also blow on bottles, crush cornflakes, jangle spurs, and create all kinds of musical mayhem from their sonic saddlebag. Indeed, all the bangs, booms, clatter, and clamor that helped define the do-or-die, gun-slinging, cinematic American West are here to be relished. With a fistful of humor and a bucket full of fun, The Spaghetti Western Orchestra, produced by the team that brought the world Stomp, will be riding into the U.S. this fall with a wagon train of instruments and a unique take on the legendary Morricone scores of such classic shoot ’em ups as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and, of course, Once Upon a Time in the West.