"Comprised of Ray’s fellow session musicians, The Button Down Brass had its genesis in a session he did for Reader’s Digest during the mid-60s. “They wanted something like Herb Alpert, two trumpets and a trombone, small group sound. It was for these records they sent out in America – record clubs – and they sold hundreds of thousands of the things. They didn’t know what to call it, and the guy from Reader’s Digest came up with Button Down Brass. Everybody said it sounded nice, a bit unusual – Ray Davies and The Button Down Brass.

Other people used different names for brass, and they never took off. But Button Down Brass stuck.” The Button Down Brass soon became recording artists themselves, releasing a series of easy listening albums on the Fontana label. By the early ’70s, the group had switched to Pye, under the aegis of staff producer Tony Palmer. But when Palmer went freelance, he took The Button Down Brass with him, signing them to Philips.



The albums made as part of that deal (and the subject of Vocalion’s reissue) – 1974’s Themes from The Exorcist, The French Connection, The Sting and other great films and 1975’s Flashpoint – both feature hard-hitting film and TV music from the pens of Lalo Schifrin, Patrick Williams, Quincy Jones, Joseph Koo, Elmer Bernstein and others.

In Ray Davies’ exciting arrangements, classic themes like Bullitt, Enter the Dragon, Kojak and Magnum Force come up afresh, with plenty of solo space for session stalwarts Alan Hawkshaw (keyboards), Alan Parker (guitars) and Alf Bigden (drums). And the quadraphonic element makes all the difference; for example, Alan Hawkshaw’s outlandish Moog effects in Enter the Dragon sit in the back speakers while the brass section screams away in the front ones.This reissue marks both albums’ debut in SACD or indeed any digital format, and contains the original stereo and quadraphonic mixes." - Vocalion SACD