It’s not every day that an avant-garde guitarist and composer gets to work with a symphony, so when Tim Brady picked up the phone and heard CBC Radio Orchestra producer Denise Ball on the other end, he was momentarily confused.

“I thought maybe she’d called the wrong person,” he says, reached at home in Montreal. But Ball’s offer was genuine: she wanted Brady to contribute to the orchestra’s second Great Canadian Songbook program, in which singer-songwriters and contemporary composers build on the work of Canadian icons such as Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Leonard Cohen. There was one small hitch, however: Ball wanted Brady to arrange songs by Bruce Cockburn.

“I never had much relationship with Bruce Cockburn’s music,” he admits, “so I wasn’t too excited by that.”

Brady suggested Neil Young, but Vancouver’s Veda Hille and Giorgio Magnanensi already had that plum.

“How about the Guess Who?” he countered, and a deal was struck.

“For the first 15 or 20 seconds, I was kind of bummed,” Brady confesses. “But then I said, ‘No, that’s just as well.’ The Guess Who are just the right artists for this, because I’m very comfortable with their music.”

Brady is reimagining “American Woman”, “These Eyes” and “Running Back to Saskatoon”, but anyone who thinks they know these classic anthems will be surprised by how they sound in their new, orchestral guise, when the CBC Radio Orchestra plays them at the Chan Centre on Sunday (April 20).

“He’s sort of allowed the melodies to remain the same, but he’s taken everything out of its context,” says Brady’s collaborator, Vancouver-based blues singer Ndidi Onukwulu, on the line from Saskatchewan. “There’s a lot of space, and a lot of interesting references to other modern composers.”

Brady adds that the tune that’s getting the most complete make-over is “Running Back to Saskatoon”.

“It was never a huge hit…so I felt freer to just completely deconstruct it,” he says of the song, now reborn as a 12-minute suite.

Although they’re happy with their work, both Brady and Onukwulu are dismayed by the CBC’s recent, and controversial, decision to disband the CBC Radio Orchestra.

“You can tell that they’re really trying to push for programs that would be considered hip, but they have no idea,” Onukwulu says. “And I think that an orchestra is just as hip as any pop rock or indie rock or any of that stuff.”

Brady concurs, but remains optimistic about the CBC’s commitment to contemporary music—and about the upcoming concert. “I keep hoping that somehow we can get this resource back,” he says.