Pitchblak Brass Band
BRUCE KUNG
February 2014 DOWNBEAT 49
ence … and bring arts back into the street but in a way in which everyone is involved.”
Honk! artists like Leppmann aren’t alone in their desire to use brass-band music to forge a connection to a larger community.
In New York, the classically trained tubaist Chanell Crichlow formed the hip-hop-meets-brass ensemble Pitchblak Brass Band in 2010 as a way of plugging into what she felt was a neglected element of her cultur-al heritage.
“We’d all heard New Orleans
brass bands … it comes from that cul-ture,” Crichlow says, referring to the Manhattan School of Music alum-ni in her band. “But I did classical music and I thought, ‘I’m a black per-son and I need to get reconnected with my roots.’ And I wanted to connect to black music through hip-hop because it stems from blues and jazz.”
So she gathered a handful of art-ists who were willing to take some risks: Pitchblak percussionist and emcee Chris Johnson also works as a classical bass player; guitarist Ben Brody plays classical French horn; and
about half the group wrote the origi-nal music that appears on their debut album, You See Us.
“Everyone is pushing themselves to do things they didn’t do in conser-vatory,” says Crichlow.
“This music is from the heart and is less about accuracy. It’s about inter-acting with people in a person-to-per-son way. There’s no boundary between you and the audience. It’s about that immediate connection to a person two steps away from you.”
Despite that conceptual similarity to New Orleans brass bands,
Pitchblak’s execution is all its own.
Unison lines and the kind of gloss found on hip-hop studio recordings dominate Pitchblak’s sound, even when they play live. And though their rap vocals are sometimes removed for the purpose of parading during a show, the rhymes have more in com-mon with spoken word than with the more chant-oriented lyrics that turn up in many New Orleans brass bands’
music.
In fact, when it comes to her influ-ences for Pitchblak, Crichlow first cites the Madison, Wis.-based Youngblood
Brass Band and its tuba player, Nat McIntosh.
Formed in 1995 (initially under a different name), Youngblood takes after the Dirty Dozen and Soul Rebels’ stage-centric instrumenta-tion. And like those New Orleans groups, the band has historically drawn from hip-hop, jazz and rock, although punk also plays a large role in its music.
Youngblood’s snare drummer, David Henzie-Skogen, recalls that the first brass band he ever heard was Rebirth on Maceo Parker’s 1993 album, Southern Exposure, when he was 13. Already fascinated with West African drumming, he got hooked on brass fast.
“It was so much heavier than the rest of the horn-based music I was hip to at the time,” he recalls. “You could hear the history in it; you could hear that it was about more than music, that it celebrated an entire culture.”
Along with McIntosh and a few others, Henzie-Skogen joined Mama Digdown’s Brass Band and trav-eled to New Orleans and befriended members of the Hot 8.
“Our first trips to New Orleans were completely essential to devel-oping some kind of appreciation for the stuff that exists beyond notes and rhythms,” he says. “If we had any-thing to contribute to the conversa-tion, it would be by bringing some-thing else to the table. The goal was to be inspired by New Orleans, but not get too caught up in trying to play copycat. That being said … you have to get pretty deep inside the music before you can start to break rules.”
The more conservative Jack Brass Band, based in Minneapolis, is another Midwestern ensemble that forged direct ties with musicians in New Orleans in the ’90s. Like Youngblood, Jack Brass Band
mem-bers visit New Orleans reg-ularly and take what they learn there seriously.
At first, Jack Brass founder Mike Oleander was less moved by the slow tempos of tradition-al jazz-funertradition-al staples than by the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth recordings that had first inspired him to form the band in 1990.
After visiting the city repeatedly, though, musi-cians he interacted with there taught him some-thing important. He says,
“In order to play the con-temporary songs, you have to be able to play the
tra-ditionals, because it’s about the way the instruments interact with each other.”
These days, when Oleander gets a new player in the band who doesn’t know the music’s history or under-stand the rhythmic feel of a split bass and snare drum, he frequently turns to YouTube. There, the gamut of New Orleans street music, from jazz funerals to second lines to Mardi Gras Indian performances, provides a vicarious experience of the culture.
Many other artists today are using what they find on YouTube as a point of departure for entirely new concepts. Inspired by the West African-rooted drum rhythms of Mardi Gras Indians and, to a less-er extent, New Orleans brass bands, British reedist Tom Challenger has reworked classics like “Indian Red”
and “Shallow Water,” along with some of his own melodies, for Spy Boy (Babel), an album by his brass octet, Brass Mask. Henry Threadgill’s “Just The Facts And Pass The Bucket” held equal weight to the Indians’ music as Challenger worked to, in his words,
“create a thicker harmonic backdrop to some of the melodies.”
Even in New Orleans, it’s not uncommon for brass-band or Indian culture to simply provide a spring-board for innovation. The Brass-A-Holics, for example, merge a brass-band style with go-go, the genre born in Washington, D.C. Setlists can range from a Journey cover to a go-go-in-fused original to a Chuck Brown-style “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and the band’s inclusion of electric keyboards, a drumkit and a percussion setup with congas and bongos pushes the music pretty far outside of New Orleans brass-band territory.
“We’re not really trying to emulate the brass-band sound,” explains saxo-phonist Robin Clabby. “What’s more important from the brass-band tradi-tion is the way we play together. It’s a polyphonic thing: We’re really listen-ing to each other all the time.”
The band’s leader, trombonist Winston Turner, is an alumnus of both the Pinstripes, a more traditional brass band, and the pop-minded Soul Rebels. “It’s a matter of wanting to go in new musical directions, particularly if you grew up playing inside the tradi-tion,” says Clabby. “At some point you either incorporate that or you don’t feel
fulfilled musically.”
Like so many other bands in New Orleans today, the Brass-A-Holics’ exploration of other genres within the brass-band tradition is a musical descendant of what Benny Jones and the Dirty Dozen did in the late ’70s, when a lull in brass-band gigs opened the door to previously unseen experimentation.
Now that such experi-mentation has become part of the tradition, it’s hard to imagine a dearth of gigs for brass outfits.
On the same November Sunday as the Sudan’s second line, brass lov-ers in nearby Congo Square knocked out skip-stepping, high-to-low dance moves like those being employed in the parade. They were dancing before a stage in this case, but the instru-ments—a tuba, two trumpets, drums and handheld percussion, among others—were brass band-based. The music, however, was not.
As the horns improvised over parade rhythms, bandleader Earl Scioneaux III built what he calls “elec-tronic beds” of music, thick with real-time-manipulated samples of phrases the acoustic instruments in the band had just played.
Scioneaux, a.k.a. The Madd Wikkid, was leading the latest incarna-tion of his Brassft Punk project, in which a New Orleans-style brass band plays arrangements of Daft Punk, the French electronic-music duo that had a world-wide pop hit in 2013 with “Get Lucky.”
“I like the idea of taking electronic music that was never intended to be played with real instruments and bring it down and do it with [brass],”
says Scioneaux, a producer whose recent engineering credits range from Preservation Hall Jazz Band to the elec-tronic act Pretty Lights.
After enlisting the Soul Rebels to help test out the music, Scioneaux set up a Kickstarter fund in hopes of raising
$10,000 to pay the musicians and cover the studio expenses. Before the deadline had even arrived, he’d raised more than double the goal.
“People all over the U.S. ended up ordering it, and there were a ton of inter-national orders,” he says. “I had orders going all over Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore. It was kind of amazing when I started looking at the addresses and I realized how far this had reached.”
Indeed, globalization has never
sounded so local. DB
Jack Brass Band
Brass-A-Holics
BIONCA SYKES
FEBRUARY 2014 DOWNBEAT 53 Dr. Lonnie Smith at New York’s Jazz Standard (Photo: Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos)