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By creating a reinterpretation of the music of Elvis, Cirque du Soleil set out to present the songs of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll in a contemporary form that evokes the spirit of Elvis in every way. The styles of Viva ELVIS move from Delta blues to rockabilly, soul to gospel, through Dixie and Southern folk music. Some of the songs even evoke garage rock and punk, steeped in waves of hip-hop and urban music. But one thing is certain and remains consistent: the sound of Viva ELVIS is pure rock. About 30 Elvis Presley classics are heard in "Viva Elvis," but the nine-piece band playing the classics often steers those hits in new directions, sometimes trying to imagine how Elvis would do them today. You won't hear much meddling with the lean rockabilly sound of "Mystery Train." But "Jailhouse Rock" sidesteps into hip-hop and "Got A Lot O' Livin' to Do!" ventures into Zeppelin-esque guitar rock. "You have a lot of shows paying homage to Elvis doing exactly the same stuff, but this is Cirque," says Erich van Tourneau, the show's musical director and arranger. "Cirque is innovative, Elvis was innovative, so I think that's the correct way to approach it -- to keep him moving artistically."
The producers often had trouble isolating the vocal track -- Elvis liked to lay it down with the band, not in the isolation of a vocal booth -- and they didn't have access to the masters of early classics such as "Jailhouse Rock." Van Tourneau turned to live recordings, often gravitating to the 1968 TV Comeback Special. "He was at the top of his game then. I would go with the young, dangerous and hungry Elvis first, every time I could," he says. Since "Viva" is also biographical, the creative team decided a few songs could take an outside perspective, voiced by the four live female singers. Being freed from having to match time or key signatures of the records opened the door to dramatic reinterpretation: "King Creole" goes reggae; "One Night With You" gets a wispy Norah Jones feel, with Presley coming in as a ghostly backing vocal. Armed with tens of thousands of samples of Elvis’s voice, Erich van Tourneau, assisted by Ugo Bombardier, often wove several sequences and colors into the same songs, sometimes changing the key. In creating his remix, Erich was looking to accentuate and boost the emotional charge of the songs. For example, he incorporated ragga rhythms into King Creole, and urban and hip-hop sounds into Blue Suede Shoes. But in all such cases, the watchword was to be respectful of the spirit of the original recordings. The live singers in Viva ELVIS are all female; the only male voice is that of Elvis himself – on the grounds that only Elvis could possibly do justice to Elvis when it came to portraying his vitality and seductive charm. Isolating his voice on the original recordings was a major technical challenge, because his voice and the instruments were almost always recorded on the same tracks.
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