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Kirk Joseph of Dirty Dozen Brass Band on sousaphone.
Showing posts with label dirty dozen brass band. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dirty dozen brass band. Show all posts
Thursday, December 19, 2013
1st Annual NY Brass & Heritage Festival feat. Rebirth Brass Band & Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Buzzfeed: 15 Quintessential New Orleans Brass Acts
#1 Rebirth Brass Band
WHAT THEY’RE KNOWN FOR: Being the very first ones to add a little funk to traditional brass arrangements.
These ambassadors of brass were formed in 1983 by local legends the Frazier brothers and trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, alongside members of their high school marching band in the Treme at the time.
WHERE YOU CAN SEE THEM: Every Tuesday night at the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carollton neighborhood Uptown
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Friday, June 15, 2012
Preservation Hall Jazz Band On World Cafe
This week, World Cafe invites you to discover the music of New Orleans with the series Sense of Place.
World Cafe, with host David Dye, presents a special performance of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band,
recorded in the birthplace of jazz. It's a special "tuba summit" in two
parts, focusing on the tuba players from some New Orleans staples and
their connection to the famous Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Ben Jaffe is
the current director of the PHJB, and from good New Orleans stock — in
fact, his parents founded the Hall. The group itself is world-renowned,
playing at Carnegie Hall and for British Royalty in its quest to bring
New Orleans jazz to everyone.
Jaffe plays the
sousaphone, upright bass and banjo. Phil Frazier, another tuba player,
is at the heart of another famous New Orleans jazz group, which he
founded while in high school 27 years ago. The Rebirth Brass Band
is true to its name, bringing hope to a city that's been through a lot —
it played for countless evacuees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Kirk Joseph is the third skilled tuba player in this group, and he
helped found Dirty Dozen Brass Band,
which has revived much of the brass-band culture in New Orleans today.
Joseph is known for his modern tuba style, which incorporates elements
of Dixieland jazz and funk.
In this
interview, Dye talks with Jaffe about the fascinating history of PHJB
and its decades-long history of high-profile touring. Next up, Joseph
and Frazier discuss the tuba's evolution in New Orleans music and
compare the instrument to the quarterback of a football team — there's
only one, and it's a key position. The session is rounded out by a
number of jazz pieces, recorded live.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Listen: Dirty Dozen Brass Band On Mountain Stage
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band makes its sixth appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live in Charleston, W.V. Widely credited with revitalizing the sound of New Orleans jazz, the band blew down musical barriers by combining its love of traditional sounds with funk and bebop. Built around the idea of jazz as a constantly evolving organism, the group has shared the stage with Grateful Dead, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, David Bowie, 2 Live Crew and The Black Crowes.
In celebrating 35 years together, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band kicks off this set with the dark grooves of "Blackbird Special," the lead track from its first album, My Feet Can't Fail Now. But the remainder of this set is drawn from the new Twenty Dozen — including "Jook," which wasn't heard on the radio broadcast of this show.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Dr. John @ BAM: Insides Out: Funky But It’s Nu Awlins
Funky But It’s Nu Awlins
Part of the 2012 Winter/Spring Season and Dr. John: Insides OutApr 12*—14 at 8pm
Produced by BAM
“Dr. John is more than just a legendary blues pianist. He’s a genuine New Orleans character.” —NPR
Featured artists:
Irma Thomas
Ivan Neville
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Nicholas Payton
Davell Crawford
Donald Harrison
For over 40 years, Dr. John has taken the exuberant and raucous sound of New Orleans under his wing, preserving its lore and channeling it through his own style of rhythm and blues. This spring, the good doctor comes to BAM with an extraordinary entourage of musical guests for an artistic residency, offering three distinct perspectives on his formidable career.
“Funky But It’s Nu Awlins” is an all-out celebration of music from the Big Easy. All-star luminaries from New Orleans past and present join the good doctor for this funk-filled program of letting loose as only the Mardi Gras faithful know how.
* BAM 150th Anniversary Gala
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Tickets start at $35
Monday, February 27, 2012
NY Times: New Orleans Saint’s Brooklyn Revival
By BEN RATLIFF
A NEW record by Mac Rebennack, a k a Dr. John,
the blues-and-roots potentate, is no big thing per se; it happens every
few years. Neither is Dr. John returning to his late-’60s coordinates
of super-informed funk, representing the rhythmic trip of West Africa to
the Antilles to the American Gulf Coast; he did that recently on “Tribal,” released a year and a half ago.
But “Tribal” probably didn’t go far beyond Dr. John’s own specialized listenership. What’s newsworthy about “Locked Down,”
his new album, to be released by Nonesuch on April 3, is that he’s
being nuzzled by someone young and much listened-to: Dan Auerbach,
singer and guitarist of the Black Keys, the post-garage band that
recently sold out a Madison Square Garden show in 15 minutes. Mr.
Auerbach collaborated with Dr. John in a set at the Bonnaroo festival
last June that I liked very much, with two drummers, backup singers and
the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. In it Dr. John sang old songs with
twisted histories, and the show vibrated with bass, organ, low brass and
quiet funk.
Soon after that they recorded “Locked Down” — Mr. Auerbach produces and
plays guitar — which is a bit more preening and academic. It’s all
original songs, clearly grown out of studio jams. There’s a single
drummer here, one of the two from the Bonnaroo show: Max Weissenfeldt,
of the German rare-groove band Poets of Rhythm. The keyboardist and
bassist, Leon Michels and Nick Movshon, are from the El Michels Affair,
one of the bands associated with Dap-Tone records from Brooklyn and the
world of retro-funk that brought you the sound of Amy Winehouse’s “Back
to Black” record. (They’ve also both played in the touring version of
the Black Keys.) The guitarist Brian Olive, once of the Soledad
Brothers, whose own solo album “Two of Everything” was produced last
year by Mr. Auerbach, is part of the same fraternity of backward-looking
obsessives.
This record will find some fans among those who loved “Back to Black,”
and it should. But have you ever wondered how hip is too hip? “Locked
Down,” with its down-cold James Black drum rhythms, distorted Fender
Rhodes keyboards and free-range, organically farmed reverb, is a useful
test case. (By the way, go back and listen to Dr. John’s complicated,
spaced-out record “The Sun, Moon & Herbs,” from 1971, when all
recordings were analog: are we trying to out-hip that on its own terms?)
If Dr. John weren’t grounding it with his casual essence, it might
collapse under the weight of its own studied scuff.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
NPR: Where The Tuba Lives: 5 New Orleans Songs Featuring The Fat Horn
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival begins Friday, and music fans from all over the world will flock to the city's racetrack for seven days of music. A lot of things make New Orleans a one-of-a-kind music town, but one is the tuba, the monstrous brass instrument worn like a python squeezing its victim. When jazz began there after WWI, the tuba supplied the rhythmic bottom. As the music spread to Chicago, New York and beyond, the tuba spread with it, but was soon replaced by the more precise double bass. The hard-to-control (but easy to parade with) tuba soon disappeared from jazz almost everywhere, but not in the music's birthplace.
In New Orleans, even today, having a tuba in the band remains standard operating procedure. It's used not only in the city's countless parades (any excuse will do), not only in the trad-jazz outfits that still flourish there, not only in the new-wave brass bands that mix funk and hip-hop into the old carnival parade music, but also in rock bands such as Bonerama and the Anders Osborne Band and in contemporary jazz bands led by John Ellis and Kermit Ruffins.
Most tuba players in New Orleans play the sousaphone, a kind of tuba designed by John Philip Sousa himself to be easier to carry, with a wider bore for warmer sound and a forward-facing bell for better projection. Music sounds different when it's anchored by a sousaphone rather than an acoustic or electric bass. Because it's a wind instrument rather than a string instrument, the tuba gives New Orleans music a bottom that bubbles rather than twangs. Here are five examples of how the tuba makes its mark on the city's music.
5 New Orleans Songs Featuring The Fat Horn
Tuba Fats
After the heyday of traditional New Orleans jazz had passed, tuba music was kept alive in New Orleans by Allan Jaffe — who led the aptly named Preservation Hall Jazz Band — by Walter Payton (father of modern jazz star Nicholas) and by Tuba Fats. Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen (1950-2004) played with many of the city's top parade ensembles (the Young Tuxedo, Treme, Olympia and Chosen Few Brass Bands) and he showed the way to the tuba's embrace of funkier, bluesier music. You can hear that in this 1985 version of Professor Longhair's carnival standard, "Mardi Gras in New Orleans."
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
It's hard to overestimate the impact of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band on New Orleans music. When a group of young and unknown horn players and marching drummers started playing weekly gigs in the late '70s at Daryl's and the Glass House, they expanded the brass-band repertoire beyond the old warhorses to include everything from James Brown to Thelonious Monk, as well as vigorous originals. They played with a muscular funk that was largely propelled by Kirk Joseph's sousaphone. The band convinced a generation that brass-band music was cool and inspired the Rebirth Brass Band, the Soul Rebels Brass Band, the New Birth Brass Band and dozens more. But none of the younger groups had the jazz chops that the Dozen had, as you can hear in this 1985 medley of Monk's "Blue Monk" and T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday." The Dirty Dozen Brass Band plays the Jazzfest on May 1.
Rebirth Brass Band
The most prominent of the Dirty Dozen's heirs was the Rebirth Brass Band, co-founded in 1982 by three teenagers: trumpeter (and future Treme star) Kermit Ruffins, bass drummer Keith Frazier and tuba player Philip Frazier. They were too young to have sophisticated jazz chops or tastes; they were out to create a distinctive form of New Orleans dance music. They did just that, thanks in large part to the rolling bass lines that rumbled and tumbled out of Frazier's tuba. They summed up their philosophy in this 1989 recording, "Feel Like Funkin' It Up." The Rebirth Brass Band plays the Jazzfest on May 8.
Bonerama
Bonerama gets its name from the fact that four-sevenths of the band are trombonists. But the band's bottom is held down by sousaphonist Matt Perrine, whose ability to play eighth notes and triplets on his unwieldy instrument is showcased here in his 2007 composition, "Bayou Betty." Unlike most of the city's brass bands, Bonerama emphasizes rock 'n' roll over jazz and R&B, giving songs by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles an unexpected Mardi Gras flavor. Bonerama plays the Jazzfest on May 6.
Anders Osborne
Kirk Joseph, the Dirty Dozen's original tuba player, later played for years with Anders Osborne, the Swedish-born blues singer who settled in New Orleans at age 19 and became one of the city's musical fixtures. With the zeal of a convert, Osborne adopted the local habits, including the use of the tuba to give his blues a percolating feel that one would never hear in nearby Mississippi, much less Sweden. You can hear how he and Joseph feed off each other in this 2001 Osborne original, "Stoned, Drunk and Naked." Osborne plays the Jazzfest on May 1.
Monday, December 6, 2010
NY Times: The Night New Orleans Came to Brooklyn
By JON PARELES
Starting with a parade (down an opera-house aisle) and ending nearly three hours later with a jam session, Red Hot + New Orleans brought a generous Crescent City spirit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday night to kick off a two-night stand.
Trombone Shorty, who also plays trumpet, was curator of the show, the latest of the Red Hot Organization’s AIDS benefit concerts, which donated some proceeds to the New Orleans NO/AIDS Task Force. Born Troy Andrews in New Orleans, Trombone Shorty is ubiquitous in his hometown as a bandleader and a sideman; his 2010 album, “Backatown” (Verve Forecast), is nominated for a Grammy Award.
He assembled his city’s longtime stars, including Irma Thomas and Dr. John, along with local stalwarts like the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins; the keyboardist Ivan Neville; the hip-hop producer Mannie Fresh; the soul singer Marc Broussard; and members of two pre-eminent brass bands, Rebirth and the Dirty Dozen. Trombone Shorty sat in with just about everyone, playing R&B, funk, jazz and the New Orleans hip-hop variant called bounce. He also led his own band (and the concert’s house band), Orleans Avenue, which put the heft and dynamics of rock behind his own riffing, growling trombone.
Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the musical culture of New Orleans has persevered, still cherishing its long memory, its amiably shared local lore, its rhythmic genius and songs that are tough-minded even as they grin. Perhaps inevitably, the city’s culture is growing less insular. Many of the concert’s performers have had televised moments lately — or, like Trombone Shorty and Mr. Ruffins, repeated exposure — on the HBO series “Treme.” Mr. Ruffins sang the “Treme” theme during the concert’s final jam on “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which also segued into a Mardi Gras Indians song, “Let’s Go Get ’Em.”
New Orleans music also maintains its jazz-funeral determination to celebrate rather than mourn. Partners-N-Crime, a rap duo that had local bounce hits in the 1990s, enlisted Trombone Shorty and Rebirth members for a second-line parade sound in “Foot Work”; it included the lines “Katrina’s gone, can’t cry no more/ All the money’s gone, but the levees ain’t broke no more.”
Giant Mardi Gras beads hung over the stage and dangled from the box seats; a video backdrop showed images of the city and its people. That didn’t turn the opera house into a carnival, but the music got people up and dancing.
Dr. John and Ms. Thomas each did minisets of hits. Ms. Thomas seesawed between sultriness and ache in “It’s Raining” and “Ruler of My Heart.” Dr. John cackled through “Such a Night” with a splashy barrelhouse piano coda, turned to funk with “Right Place, Wrong Time” and led a spooky “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” with Mr. Neville on Hammond organ playing atmospheric chords like smoke signals.
True to a New Orleans heritage, two-fisted piano reappeared through the show. Mr. Neville riffled through the Mardi Gras mambo of Professor Longhair’s “Big Chief,” and an unannounced guest, Jonathan Batiste, splayed chords across the keyboard in “Saints.” In his own segment, Mr. Neville seized a family legacy, playing the jigsaw New Orleans funk of his uncle Art Neville’s band, the Meters. Mr. Ruffins, who sang when he wasn’t playing sweet and tart trumpet, looked toward Louis Armstrong, reviving a southern African song from the Armstrong repertory, “Skokiaan,” and sharing “What a Wonderful World” with the R&B singer Ledisi, whose scat-singing fluttered around his rasp.
The concert had some ups and downs; Mannie Fresh is an important figure in New Orleans hip-hop as a producer (notably of the Hot Boys, who included Lil Wayne and Juvenile), not a rapper. But Trombone Shorty had clearly set out to present New Orleans as a city whose glory days aren’t over. One of his band’s tunes was called “Hurricane Season,” and it was no lament. With high-note-trumpet lines and a “Hey!” shout-along, it was a signal that the city’s music would push ahead.
Additional pics from Nola.com:
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wall Street Journal: Trombone Shorty Assembles a Sound Track [in NYC] for His Hometown
Play Hard for the Big Easy
By JIM FUSILLI
Part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2010 Next Wave Festival, the Red Hot + New Orleans program promises a multigenerational look at the music of the Crescent City. Trombone Shorty, as Troy Andrews is known, is the two-night event's curator and musical director, and he says New Yorkers may be surprised at what the all-star lineup intends to deliver.
Philip Montgomery"You have the Great American Songbook and then you have the Great New Orleans Songbook," Mr. Andrews said. "A lot of people we're featuring, they had national hits—but they had local hits, too. And we all know that material."
BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House will host shows on Friday and Saturday night. The lineup includes Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Kermit Ruffins, Ivan Neville—could there be a celebration of the city's music without a Neville on stage?—Marc Broussard, Ledisi, members of the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth brass bands, and the rap duo Partners-N-Crime. It's the latest event in BAM's multiartist series conducted in collaboration with Red Hot, a nonprofit production company that raises funds and awareness to fight AIDS and HIV, and will help benefit the New Orleans-based NO/AIDS Task Force.
Meanwhile, nearby at the BAMcafé, the New Orleans theme will continue after the main shows: Brother Joscephus and the Love Revival Revolution Orchestra—they'll be joined by local DJs the Dustbin Brothers—on Friday; and the boisterous Funky Nation with Big Sam Williams on Saturday.
"I played with mostly all of them," Mr. Andrews said of the acts on the main-stage bill. "Numerous times, in fact." The exception, he added, was Ledisi, the R&B belter. They've never worked together, he said, "but we're good friends."
Mr. Andrews, 24 years old, is an ideal choice to bring together several generations of New Orleans musicians. His grandfather, Jessie Hill, played with Professor Longhair and Dr. John, and sang the Allen Toussaint-produced R&B hit "Ooh-Poo-Pah-Doo." It's said Mr. Andrews ran his first band when he was 6 years old; he started playing with the trombone before that: You can find pictures online of him struggling with an instrument twice his size, which may explain his nickname. He's been recording since age 16; his latest album, "Backatown" (Verve), is a jazz-funk mix rooted deeply in his hometown. He and his brother James, a noted trumpeter who's also on the BAM bill, performed "Ooh-Poo-Pah-Doo" during an episode of "Treme," the HBO series set in the neighborhood where the Andrews brothers were born.
Mr. Andrews said BAM approached him more than a year ago about curating an event. "We just had New Orleans and me," he explained. In time, the concept was refined. "We'll play the legendary tunes of New Orleans. You'll get a bunch of different music coming at you." He called the program "a musical gumbo."
Mr. Ruffins, the trumpeter and co-founder of the Rebirth Brass Band—and also a featured actor on "Treme"—said each of the leaders submitted five songs for consideration. He'll be paying tribute to Louis Armstrong with a cover of "What a Wonderful World" and performing "More Today Than Yesterday," a track on his new disc "Happy Talk" (Basin Street). But there's room for spontaneity, too.
"I just look at the audience to see whether they're sit-down or get-funky," Mr. Ruffins said. "I play around until I see what they like."
Like Mr. Andrews, Mr. Ruffins has played with just about everybody on the bill, too—except, surprisingly, Dr. John, a fixture of the city's music scene since the 1950s. "I've been in his company many times, but we never did play together," Mr. Ruffins said. "That will be really special for me."
Friday, September 10, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
In Pictures: Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jon Batiste Band @ BB King's
Dirty Dozen Brass Band - BB King's, NYC 6/8/10
Dirty Dozen Brass Band - BB King's, NYC 6/8/10
Weize & Roger (Dirty Old Man) Lewis - BB King's, NYC 6/8/10
Jon Batiste - BB King's, NYC 6/8/10
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Tonight: Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jon Batiste Band @ BB King's
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