[Dixielandjazz] Great article in the NY Times on many new and old brass bands

[David Richoux]

maybe I beat Steve B on this?

Dave Richoux
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April 9, 2006
MUSIC
They're With the Band, Speaking That Global Language: Brass

By JOSH KUN
LAST December, the veteran Mexican-American rock band Los Lobos  
dusted off its 1992 album "Kiko" and performed it live, start to  
finish, at the House of Blues in West Hollywood. For most of the  
night it was a standard rock setup, but when it came time for the  
album closer, a woozy Mexican folk swoon called "Rio de Tenampa," Los  
Lobos brought out Los Cenzontles, a Northern California banda troupe.  
While Mexican bandas (brass bands) can have as many as 20 members,  
Los Cenzontles didn't need much more than a tuba, a trumpet, a  
thudding bass drum and a pair of clarinets to turn the club into a  
raucous cantina.

Brass band music can have this effect. The stammering pepper-spray of  
horns, the crisp snaps of snare rolls: it's precise and excessive at  
once, a joyous emotional tornado awash in spit, sweat and  
celebration. No wonder it's one of the world's most-spoken musical  
languages — from Serbian villages to Manhattan's bustling "gypsy punk  
scene" to this year's Grammy Awards, where Kanye West reinvented  
"Gold Digger" by having a marching band play, running through the  
aisles. Awareness of international brass styles has blossomed in  
recent years in the United States, thanks in large part to an  
increase in domestic album distribution deals and more frequent  
international concert tours.

"You would think that a brass band, which has no strings at all,  
would be limited in its sound," said Tamir Muskat, the Israeli-born  
co-founder of Balkan Beat Box, a new-school crew in New York known  
for wild live shows that mix Balkan horn blasts with electronic  
beats. "But it's unbelievable what people manage to do with it. There  
is a whole world of brass out there."

Listen to enough brass band music — whether a slice of Mexican banda  
or the Romanian group Fanfare Ciocarlia pulling the trigger on a  
dizzying blast of high-velocity trumpets — and you start to hear the  
history of the world handed back to you in a horn section. Suddenly,  
Serbia and Romania could be the alternative birthplace of Brazilian  
frevo; brass flurries from Gypsy bands in Macedonia and Bulgaria  
could be lost cousins of the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band from India, the  
Gangbe Brass Band from Benin or any New Orleans jazz troupe.

The connections are more than theoretical. In the 1860's, thousands  
of former Gypsy slaves fled Romania for the American South, landing  
in mostly black neighborhoods. The brass music they brought with  
them, like that of all Balkan countries, can be traced to the Turks,  
the original band geeks. Last year's "Blowers From the Balkans"  
compilation (Topic), which unearthed a trove of early 20th-century  
Balkan brass recordings, spelled it out loud and clear: it was the  
Ottoman Empire's janissary bands that turned brass into the lingua  
franca of Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria.

"The Ottoman empire used brass bands to impress the enemy, walking  
and playing in front of the first line of soldiers," explained Oprica  
Ivancea, the lead clarinetist for Fanfare Ciocarlia, a 12-piece band  
of Romany Gypsies who work out of the remote mountain town of Zece  
Prajini (population 400) in eastern Romania. "But in the early 19th  
century, brass got popular in Germany and Austria and because  
Romanians always want to be like the Germans we began to adapt to  
their sound as well."

Long before Kelly Clarkson and Jay-Z (and for that matter, long  
before rock 'n' roll), European military and church bands were the  
world's top global musical exports. Locals throughout Asia, Africa  
and the Americas were trained in the ways of the marching band as  
part of colonialism. As empires dissolved, official bands soon became  
voluntary village bands, and by the turn of the 20th century most of  
the world shared an ingrained knowledge of all things brass.

"All brass bands have a link somewhere," Mr. Muskat said. "Ninety  
percent of all brass bands are based on the same elements. It's all  
rhythm and horns."

Mr. Muskat's Balkan Beat Box partner Ori Kaplan grew up in Jaffa,  
Israel, where he watched Egyptian orchestras on television and  
learned to play Eastern European klezmer clarinet from a Bulgarian  
trained by Gypsy brass musicians. When Mr. Kaplan moved to New York  
15 years ago, though, he wanted nothing of his klezmer past, choosing  
instead to play in industrial punk bands. That all changed when he  
heard a CD from Macedonia's top brass band, Kocani Orkestar, and  
learned about the Gypsy-Turkish fusions of the Bulgarian horn  
stalwart Yuri Yunakov, another New York City transplant). "I started  
to listen to Balkan music constantly," Mr. Kaplan said, "I became a  
brass band freak."

Of brass band enthusiasts in the United States, however, few can top  
the trumpeter Frank London, whose Klezmer Brass All-Stars have just  
released their third raucous manifesto of brass globalization,  
"Carnival Conspiracy." While firmly grounded in both Balkan and  
klezmer traditions (Mr. London's main gig is with the tradition- 
bending Klezmatics), "Carnival" makes cross-cultural brass connection  
its guiding impulse, riffing on the beer hall oompah of Mexican banda  
and the funk marches of Brazilian frevo and batucada. If the batucada  
seems like a stretch, it shouldn't: the first Jews in North America  
were Eastern European immigrants from Recife, Brazil — the capital of  
Brazilian big band.

"The idea of brass repertoires crossing genres and being assimilated  
into different traditions has been going on in all of these brass  
band musics forever," said Mr. London, who in the 1980's also fronted  
Les Misérables Brass Band, playing music from Pakistan, Serbia and  
South America (as well as the occasional Jimi Hendrix cover). "For  
many years, the most popular song for Indian brass bands was  
'Tequila.' When you play an Italian feast, you don't just do Italian  
parade music. At the end you sit down and play opera overtures, then  
you can do covers of popular music, dance music, jazz music. Most  
brass bands just have this breadth of repertoire and styles at their  
fingertips."

Fanfare Ciocarlia have made a career out of this kind of stylistic  
juggling. They play everything from Russian-influenced Romanian  
doinas (slow improvised melodies) to Gypsy maneas (melancholy love  
songs) born in India, and on their latest CD, "Gili Garabdi," tackle  
an Afro-Cuban rumba alongside versions of the James Bond theme and  
Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's "Caravan."

"We play music and dances we learned from our fathers," said Mr.  
Ivancea, who considers Gili Garabdi a tribute to the shared heritage  
of Gypsy brass and African-American jazz. "But we also play any tune  
requested during a wedding or baptism. We provide a service — we have  
to play what people want to hear."

In 2003, Mr. London decided to test these theories of a single brass  
family tree on an actual collaboration. So on the Klezmer Brass All- 
Stars' sophomore outing, "Brotherhood of Brass," he sought out the  
Hasaballa Brass Band from Cairo and Boban Markovic, a Serbian trumpet  
king, for a series of reeling geography mashups that imagined Eastern  
European shtetls and Egyptian markets sprouting up in Serbian villages.

"Over the last few years, I've noticed that my music has become part  
of a larger global conversation," said Mr. Markovic, who has been  
known to start his live sets with a version of the theme from  
"Titanic." "Knowing someone's music is so much easier these days. But  
I am still mostly trying to communicate with local people, especially  
communities in the south of Serbia and in the Balkans."

In that spirit, Mr. Markovic's newest album, "The Promise," features  
his typically kaleidoscopic takes on standard coceks (stomping Gypsy  
dance tunes), but also dips into the Latin American brass band  
tradition with "Latino" and "Voz," songs that wouldn't sound out of  
place on the set list of a Mexican banda. Which makes perfect sense  
considering that the Mexican brass style — one of the most  
commercially dominant genres in that country's music industry — was  
initially inspired by the Franco-Austrian military bands that reached  
Mexico through the coastal hub of Mazatlán in the 1800's.

"Our brass music is very similar to German music," said Poncho  
Lizárraga of Banda el Recodo, Mexico's longest-running brass  
ensemble, founded by Mr. Lizárraga's father, Don Cruz, in 1938. "We  
just interpreted it differently, turned the polkas into our own  
rancheras. My father wanted something different from all that music  
coming from Europe. It was music just for our town, and in the  
beginning, mostly for people who liked to spend too much time in the  
cantinas."

More than six decades and 180 albums later (their latest, "Hay Amor,"  
has just been released), Recodo's 17 members are international banda  
ambassadors who wear matching jewel-studded suits made of black  
velvet, and their music has become a favorite sample source for hip- 
hop and electronic acts like Akwid from Los Angeles, Wakal from  
Mexico City and Nortec Collective from Tijuana. Similarly, the  
growing popularity of Balkan brass with sample-hunting D.J.'s in the  
United States and Europe — led by Shantel of Germany, whose "Bucovina  
Club" nights in Frankfurt ignited an electro-Balkan avalanche — which  
has been a key factor in introducing the centuries-old music to first- 
time listeners.

On Shantel's new "Bucovina Club Vol. 2" mix CD, Balkan Beat Box makes  
an appearance, and he throws a few house beats under cuts from  
Fanfare Ciocarlia and Mahala Rai Banda, another Romanian band, but  
mostly he lets the old-school originals speak for themselves: the  
traditional as the new cutting-edge.

"People are tired of corporate-friendly rock 'n' roll and the cold  
nihilism of the electronic music scene," said Mr. Kaplan of Balkan  
Beat Box. "They're hungry for this really sweaty, personal, alcohol- 
driven, familiar, ceremony-like music. There's something very healthy  
about all of this interest in brass music. People just want to get  
back in touch with their feelings."