The Beau Hunks
| The Beau Hunks | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Netherlands |
| Genres | Jazz, Swing |
| Years active | 1992–present |
| Labels | Basta, EigenWijs, Koch Screen, Movies Select Audio |
| Associated acts | The Beau Hunks Sextette, The Beau Hunks Saxophone Soctette, The Beau Hunks Saxophone Quartet, and The Beau Hunks Orchestra |
The Beau Hunks are a Dutch revivalist music ensemble who have performed and recorded the vintage works of composers Leroy Shield, Raymond Scott, Edward McDowell, Ferde Grofé, and others. They have been referred to as a "documentary orchestra," because they perform note-perfect renditions of music which is obscure and often commercially unavailable. For some projects for which no sheet music was known to exist, they had to reconstruct charts from original recordings extracted from films.
For various projects they have been reconfigured as The Beau Hunks Sextette, The Beau Hunks Saxophone Soctette, The Beau Hunks Saxophone Quartet, and The Beau Hunks Orchestra. They have recorded for the labels Movies Select Audio, EigenWijs (a division of the VPRO, the Dutch public broadcasting network), Basta Audio-Visuals, and Koch Screen.
The Beau Hunks Orchestra was originally a quintet organized to perform soundtrack themes from Hal Roach film studio comedies of the 1930s, including those of Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, The Little Rascals, Charley Chase, Thelma Todd and the Taxi Boys. The group (whose name derives from a 1931 Laurel and Hardy film Beau Hunks) gave what was intended to be their only public performance on 18 January 1992, at the Oliver Hardy Centennial in Amsterdam. However, based on the success of the performance, the band decided to expand to a full orchestra and record their repertoire for commercial CD release.
The Roach film music, composed mostly by Leroy Shield (without screen credit), with additional songs and cues by T. Marvin Hatley, was publicly familiar, but had never been commercially released, and the original recordings and scores were presumed lost. In the mid-1980s, Piet Schreuders, a Dutch graphic designer and radio programmer, began assembling a tape library of Hal Roach comedy themes, transferred directly from the soundtrack of VHS tapes. Because the films contain dialogue and sound effects which occasionally obscure the music, Schreuders isolated fragments of themes without dialogue or sound effects and edited them into complete, uninterrupted versions. "Nobody had the original masters of these songs," Schreuders told The New York Times in 1994. "The music wasn't available anywhere else except in the films themselves, where they could only be heard in short segments. Luckily, each song was used so many times that it was theoretically possible, given enough time and patience, to splice [each] song together."
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