Anyone who hasn’t seen the Spaghetti Western Orchestra in performance (either on TV or at one of the gigs on their trans-global tour) will probably wonder what the fuss is all about. There are countless CDs on soundtrack shelves of little known orchestras performing Ennio Morricone’s western standards, so what’s different here? Well, for a start, there might be 100 instruments played by the orchestra, but there’s only five members on stage, and since when did you last listen to a spaghetti western soundtrack away from the original movie and still get accomplished Mini Hollywood-quality foley sound effects?

This might all sound a bit hokey, but nothing could be further from the truth. The passion that the players bring to the performances – five Australians, no less – is never in dispute. Dressed in Deadwood-style cowboy attire with corpse-white faces, the band here perform their Morricone set live at the Montreal Jazz Festival. The discs burst to life with a note-perfect ‘Man with the Harmonica’ from Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s a great start, followed by the equally impressive The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and this is where the Spaghetti Western Orchestra difference come to play. Morricone’s westerns were never just about the instruments – it was the chorals, the whistles, the springs, boings and the grunts, and that’s what these cowboys add to marvellous effect.  It’s not just about the notes on the manuscript, it’s the whole experience.

As you’d hope, there are tracks from all of Leone’s westerns, plus Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara. Throw in a bit of Death Rides a Horse, The Ballad of Hank McCain and A Professional Gun, and you get a pretty comprehensive ‘Best of Morricone westerns’ set.  Four tracks on the album are actually vocals, juicy dialogue with sound effects, but as they only add up to six minutes they can easily be tracked out and don’t detract from the otherwise generous running time. And while the full fun of the audience participation in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly reprise can’t fully be appreciated without actually being there, it’s a great indicator of what you can expect at a SWO gig.

Not convinced yet? Listen to the samples on iTunes, or better still watch the YouTube clips embedded in the www.spaghettiwesternorchestra.com website. Unique, devoted to Il Maestro and boasting a wonderful sense of gallows humour, this Antipdoean quintet get a huge thumbs-up from this die-hard spaghetti western fan. Yes, it doesn’t sound the same as the originals – er, I can listen to the originals if I want that – instead, we get  passionate reinventions with one of the widest lexicon of instruments you’ll ever see on stage.

You might already have the Remix albums or the ‘We Love Ennio Morricone’ tribute disc – but you won’t have anything like this. Of course, if you already have a version of Chi Mai performed on beer bottles, or Edda Dell’Orso’s vocals on Once Upon a Time in the West replaced by a theremin, you could can ignore the previous sentence.  An Australian tribute band to an Italian film composer? As if. Next they’ll be making Italian westerns, set in the American West, and filmed in Southern Spain..