[Dixielandjazz] Cross between jazz and funk yields "Junk Music"

[david richoux]

There is a totally different sort of "junk music" that hit New Orleans
around 1983 - at Jazzfest that year or next  a large group of Junkanoo
performers from The Bahamas paraded and performed several times.
Junkanoo bands are carnival street-bands with colorful  costumes and
simple, loud instruments - mostly drums, bells, whistles, honking
horns and such. There is some cultural & historical similarity with
Mardi Gras Indians but the "musical" aspects are different.

This group is a bit more musical than the one I saw in New Orleans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj1vqUU1rAU and the costumes are much
more elaborate!


Dave Richoux

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 7:40 AM, Stephen G Barbone
<barbonestreet at earthlink.net> wrote:
> New Orleans Horns, Raw and Funky
>
> NY TIMES - By NATE CHINEN - August 11, 2011
>
>
> The Rebirth Brass Band ended its full-throttle show at Brooklyn Bowl on
> Thursday night more or less swarmed, yielding the stage to an eager throng.
> This of course was a handy bit of showmanship, timed to coincide with
> several of the band’s best-loved New Orleans anthems (“Feel Like Funkin’ It
> Up,” “Cassanova,” “Do Whatcha Wanna”) and with the climax of accumulated
> energies in the room. But it was also an affirmation of core principles. A
> stage is little more than a platform for the Rebirth Brass Band, and the
> distance it imposes on an audience is a passing inconvenience, even on the
> road.
>
> Rebirth, as the band is often hailed at home, has barely deviated from the
> formula set by its leader, the sousaphone player Phil Frazier, in 1983.
> Commingling parade-band protocols with the more ragged aspects of jazz and
> funk — “junk music” is Mr. Frazier’s term for the crossbred result — the
> group chases down euphoria one boisterous groove at a time. In New Orleans
> the band plays most Tuesday nights at the Maple Leaf Bar, where the main
> space accommodates about as many people as the Brooklyn Bowl stage.
>
> This was a stop on the road in support of a sturdy new album, “Rebirth of
> New Orleans,” on the Basin Street label. (The band is traveling most of this
> month, before returning home in time for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage
> Festival. This summer it will headline “A Night in Treme,” a tour pegged to
> the HBO series.) At times there was a hint of the routine in the show’s
> pacing, but never a flagging of intensity. And the newer songs held their
> ground against the classics: “I Like It Like That,” with a churning beat, a
> blaring trumpet lead and a puttering riff for saxophone and trombone, was as
> exhilarating as anything else in the set.
>
> Rebirth’s trademark is loose precision, unruly at the granular level but
> cohesive on the whole. Mr. Frazier and his brother, Keith Frazier, who plays
> bass drum, held down a resilient low end; the tenor saxophonist Vincent
> Broussard and the trombonist Corey Henry maintained the mid-range, often
> sparring on the fly.
>
> Two assertive trumpeters, Glen Andrews and Derrick Shezbie, carried most of
> the melodies, arranged in fortified octaves or a resplendent unison. (In
> “What Goes Around Comes Around” they also traded eight-bar solo bursts.) As
> for the snare drummer, Derrick Tabb, his second-line rhythms and syncopated
> rudiments gave the music its kinetic thrust, riveting and funky.
>
> Thursday’s show happened to precede Bowl Train, a weekly late-night D.J. set
> by Questlove, the drummer with the Roots. Specializing in myriad strains of
> R&B — one stretch had him transitioning from Sunshine Anderson’s “Heard It
> All Before” into the Heavy D remix of Soul for Real’s “Candy Rain,” into
> signature hits by Experience Unlimited and Soul II Soul — he made at least
> one nod to the occasion. His first track was a brass-band version of Michael
> Jackson’s “Human Nature.” It was probably the one by the Youngblood Brass
> Band, not Rebirth, but the resonance was clear enough.
>
>
> The Rebirth Brass Band will play on Wednesday in Austin, Tex.; Thursday in
> Houston; and Friday in Dallas; rebirthbrassband.com.
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