What is that? Do-Re-Mi / ABC? A mash-up of The Jackson five’s ABC with The Sound of Music? And it curiously works, although I hate musicals and I have always found reworking old materials not that impressive.
But A-B-C dives so easily into Do-Re-Mi: same rhythm, same groove, black singing kid family greets white singing kid family, Indiana USA going Motown meets the Swiss Alps made in Hollywood, and then the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s song even gets a brief reggae treatment, because what cannot be reggae-nized?
The instrumental quartet Brooklyn Rundfunk Orkestrata has adapted the classic score of ‘The Sound of Music’ into an album ‘The Hills are Alive’, which was just released on March 8th.
‘Ever since I was a kid, I’ve watched the movie on TV at the holidays, but I’d come to realize how few really original variations I’d heard on these songs,’ said frontman Peter Kiesewalter to the NY Times in an interview:
There were some legal issues, but the President of Rodgers & Hammerstein granted the band unprecedented artistic license with the music, past the first impression of such a bold move. The BRO mixes jazz, country, rock, bebop and apparently everything else… and this The-Jackson 5-collide-into-The-von-Trapp-Seven mash-up could not work better, making the connection between two iconic American families.