I keep a vari­ety of online feel­ers out for bas­soon-relat­ed things. Much of what comes back to me is spam or oth­er­wise unin­ter­est­ing. But, I do find out about arti­cles and con­certs that I might not oth­er­wise. My favorite sort of dis­cov­er­ies, though, are of obscure and often long-for­got­ten bits of bas­soon miscellany.

That’s exact­ly what I came across a cou­ple of weeks ago in the record whose cov­er you see at right. It’s a 7‑inch 45 rpm sin­gle by the Nov­el­ty Dis­co Band, record­ed and pressed in France in 1977. After find­ing men­tion of it online, I bought a copy from some­one in Spain. It showed up on my doorstep late last week. Although the A‑side tune “I Love Your Big Bas­soon” is, per­haps pre­dictably, main­ly a vehi­cle for dou­ble enten­dres, it does in fact fea­ture a bas­soon play­ing short riffs and dis­co basslines. Actu­al­ly, it sounds to me like a French bas­son, which would make sense giv­en the place and time. Edit: Marc Val­lon has point­ed out that’s it’s not a bas­son, just a poor­ly mic-ed Ger­man bassoon.

I’ve been unable to find out any­thing about the Nov­el­ty Dis­co Band — this appears to be the only record released under that name. The label and sleeve pro­vide very lit­tle in the way of real infor­ma­tion. The only per­son­nel list­ed are the song­writ­ers: D. Chase and J.P. Sabard. A lit­tle ‘net research leads me to think that their full (and real) names are Dina (or Diana) Chase and Jean-Pierre Guigon. But there the trail ends. Sad­ly, there is no indi­ca­tion of who the bas­soon­ist is.

Have a lis­ten: [haiku url=“Novelty-Disco-Band-I-Love-Your-Big-Bassoon.mp3” title=“Novelty Dis­co Band — I Love Your Big Bassoon”]