The godlike greatness of David Bowie should be damn near incontrovertible, and pairing some of his greatest songs with a fifty-piece orchestra has this avowed Bowie acolyte near salivation. Fortunately, there are still tickets available for Seattle Rock Orchestra‘s David Bowie Tribute at the Moore Theater tonight.
Local musician/arranger Scott Teske’s been wowing local fans for several months now with the SRO, augmenting fine homegrown bands like The Black Swedes and Grand Hallway with classy horn-and-string flourishes, and tearing down the Fremont Abbey with SRO’s inspirational live take on the Arcade Fire’s Funeral (previewed in these here online pages in November 2009).
A terrific revolving-door of local vocalists (The Posies’ Jon Auer, People Eating People’s Nouela Johnston, Kindness Kind’s Alessandra Rose, and Aqueduct’er David Terry, among them) will lend their talents to some of Bowie’s greatest material (word has it that they’ll cover tracks from Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, and Diamond Dogs), and with a four-dozen-piece orchestra milking every bit of drama from the Thin White Duke’s succulently theatrical tunes, it’ll be a real crash course for the ravers.
I’ll take no back seat to any Bowie fan – I remember waiting for a school bus in high school (circa 1972), with a huge fight, a virtual donnybrook around whether it was ‘Baugh-ie’, ‘Bo-ie’, or ‘Boo-ie’.
The scheeching on Man Who Sold the World is just horrid. When the LP came out, I’d just read the classic SF short on which it was based. Oddly, I couldn’t find it on the Net, but it was one of those weird, jokey SF short stories that were abundant in the 50s and 60s. The big ‘joke’ of this one was similar to the selling the Brooklyn Bridge bit – some aliens land and some character tries to make money by selling the rights to the planet. Then the aliens decide to collect.
Bowie is an artist worthy of a serious symphonic production – this clip says ‘wait til it happens’.
Oh, and given that they cover Hunky, Ziggy and Diamond, the Thin White Duke won’t make an appearance.
The idea was nice, the orchestra wasn’t bad – but the singers were embarrassingly amateurish. High schoolers doing karaoke, trying to sound like Bowie – just makes you cringe.