[Dixielandjazz] Long but interesting delete now if you hate Brass Bands

[tcashwigg at aol.com]

The article I have been waiting for...

Finally Us Brass Band Bandeleros get some RESPECT :))

Cheers,

Tom Wiggins
ST. GABRIEL'S CELESTIAL BRASS BAND




http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/arts/music/09kun.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 

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."