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Re-Birth Brass Band: Rollin' |
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New Orleans
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Wednesday, 18 January 2006 18:57 |
Re-Birth Brass Band
Rollin'
Rounder Records
By John Sinclair
They've played all over the world, the Re-Birth Brass Band from New Orleans, entertaining people of every possible stripe from Tacoma to Tokyo to Timbuktu, but they always come back to Treme, the funky Sixth Ward neighborhood just across Rampart Street from the French Quarters where they grew up and got their start.
You can hear them on Monday nights when they're in town at the Treme Music Hall, a tastefully refurbished corner bar and dance hall (long known as Picou's Barroom) where music has been offered for the terpsichorean pleasure of several generations of resident celebrants.
Here at the corner of Ursulines and North Robertson, Re-Birth invariably packs the joint with an extremely lively crowd of native youths, mature fun-seeking citizens of Treme, and some of the city's hipper music-lovers of the Caucasian persuasion, each group out to pass a good time in its own distinctive way.
The band is always happy to oblige, because they've got everything it takes to make everybody perfectly happy: they're young and black and full of energy and fun; their music encompasses every historical phase encountered by their audience and then some, going all the way back in fact to the very beginnings of the jazz idiom and its roots in spirituals, blues, marching music and ragtime; and they've developed a sound and presentation style that is universally resonant, with a compelling beat and a high degree of melodic heat that nearly forces people to their feet.
Like Buddy Bolden and his band of a hundred years ago, Re-Birth plays dance music for the 90s--a little something to take us into the next century, where quite literally anything might happen. And like Bolden, "First Man of Jazz" in Donald Marquis's excellent phrase, Re-Birth has brought the music in from the streets, where it performs a utilitarian function as the soundtrack for the wild public spectacles known as "second-lines" that are unique to the Crescent City and crucial to understanding its vibrant culture.
Producer Keith Keller, affectionately called Fat Fred Flames by his friends, has followed Re-Birth since its earliest days in Treme and was eager to share his thoughts and impressions of the band after recording the music for this CD in the intimate confines of his Chez Flames Recording facility, way down in the old First Ward.
"The Re-Birth made this record at the end of their 10th anniversary year, right going into their 11th anniversary year. When they cut their first record, for Chris Strachwitz on Arhoolie Records, they were in junior high school, a bunch of kids marching around Treme and the Sixth Ward.
"They played all the time in little clubs, and they used to march around Treme just for the fun of marching around Treme. They'd have second-lines with no purpose at all, except to have a party. Unorganized ones, spur-of-the-moment things--they'd just do it, all the time, they'd just do it.
"A second-line, of course, is a street parade, sometimes related to a funeral but more often related to a club or a social organization in Black society, often called Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs or marching clubs, who throw parties in the streets kind of for their own self-aggrandizement....and basically for fun, good clean fun.
"A second-line is all of these people out dancing in the streets with a brass band playing its ass off and 20 people playing tambourines, sticks on wine bottles and cowbells and people dancing that buck-jump dance style that is perhaps the greatest dance style in North America of uninhibited sexual parody.
"Of course, this totally outrageous behavior in the streets inspires the bands to become more dynamic and more explosive. So you have this environment that, within the very restrictive constraints of the general social etiquette, is totally and completely outrageous. And if one did not know that there were indeed constraints, one might think that it's anarchy, when in fact it's actually very old and very mature social behavior.
"This has been going on in New Orleans--well, Danny Barker said it was going on when he was a kid, and he was born around the turn of the century [1909], so it's a very old tradition where you have brass bands and the second-liners, the people who are following and playing with the brass bands and doing this outrageous dance style, urging them on and urging their partners to be more and more outrageous.
"When they get going they call it "rollin'", hence the title of the record and the title of the song, which means that everybody is really on and the band is jumpin' and they're movin' some territory and people are being outrageous.
"Let me digress just a little bit here," Keller muses. "Brass band music was a fairly arranged type of music when it first started, back after the Civil War. It was in fact military music, and the Black bands brought gospel and blues into it, and when jazz evolved here before the turn of the century, you ended up having styles that were idiosyncratic to New Orleans.
"And those styles, to my ears, lasted from basically when Louis Armstrong invented the solo, up to when the Dirty Dozen Brass Band started changing the style around, in the very late 1970s and early '80s, by adding bebop and funk, and changing the rules as to what was going on.
"At the time that the Dirty Dozens changed the rules, the other musicians were up in arms. They were incensed. The Dozens were doing something new, and it was pissing everybody off. They thought the Dozens were contaminating a tradition. And of course the people in the streets, who were the second liners, thought it was great, and demanded it, and the next thing you knew, everybody was playing Dirty Dozens songs.
"Well, the Dozens became more sophisticated and had record company pressures to sell to a broader audience, and because they were becoming more affluent and were less inclined to play gigs at funky little places like the Glass House [where Re-Birth Kickin' It Live, Rounder CD 2106, was cut in 1990], the Re-Birth started picking up the gigs that the Dirty Dozens were dropping. And the Re-Birth, who were the next generation after the Dozens, and were much younger too, half the age, took it a step further.
"They introduced Michael Jackson tunes into the repertoire, and rap, and hard-core funk, and reggae, you know, anything they could think of. Also, more traditional but more current jazz things too, like Freddie Hubbard tunes and stuff like that. But most of all, they kept that real second-line street thing as the basis of their musical attack, and they integrated these other elements into it to make something that was really fresh and new.
"Now, a brass band rolling in a second line, surrounded by hundreds of extroverts--I mean manic, crazy, rabid extroverts, going for it, clowning like you couldn't believe, and making very graphic, physical, sexual double entendres, and drinking heavily in the streets, and smoking that reefer and shakin' them titties--that's a very physical reality, you know.
"And making a record with guys like this is a fairly physical process. I mean, you get in their face, and they get in your face, and you sort it out and roll tape again. All the musicians are playing at the same time, in the same room, standing right next to each other. And if you've never been in the room where you have six or seven horn players--a couple trumpets, a couple trombones, a saxophone and a tuba, and a person playing parade snare and cymbal, and a person playing parade bass drum and cymbal, rockin' it out, you can't imagine what the word 'dynamics' means.
"Of course, the band has gone through some personnel transitions in the last few years, and the emotional levels were very high during the making of this record. The question of how to deal with personnel in transition was something that caused a lot of great emotional anguish amongst the players. The band has changed the line-up somewhat, with Roderick Paulin being the only saxophone player now. And they changed trombone players, to where Tyrus [Chapman] is playing where Stafford [Agee] used to play.
"And the other thing is that the trumpet section has varied, because Kermit Ruffins, who was one of the original members, one of the originators of the band and one of the co-leaders along with Phil Frazier, the tuba player, has developed a solo career, and decided that his family is coming first, and he doesn't want to travel.
"And so the Re-Birth, which has always earned a living by traveling broadly and aggressively worldwide, and has been delighting audiences across the oceans for years on a regular basis, all of a sudden was missing an originator in the band, a key member and a person who played a lot of the lead trumpet parts and a person who sang the vocals and was the MC.
"This changed the chemistry in the band a lot. Kermit still does play with the band, and so he's on the record, but he's not on the record all the way--he's on the record on selected cuts, as a trumpet player and also as a vocalist.
"So this recording process really brought up a lot of issues of pride, and integrity, and what acceptable quality is. What we were hoping to do was to take the excitement and the dynamics of the band playing hot and playing very intensely and put it into a series of songs, each of which individually was a classically arranged and classically recorded song in which all hell was breaking loose, in which the dynamics were going, in which the implication of the street was undeniable.
"So what we have, basically, is a brass band record with everybody just going for it, completely over the top, but within these very narrow classical constraints, where you have intro, verse, chorus, verse, verse--standard song format. If you compare this with, for example, a pop record, the arrangements and the structure and the way things are mixed and the way sections come in and go out and change in the transitions from section to section, it's very similar to what you'd do if you were assembling a pop record.
"Frankly, when we got done with this record, I wasn't sure whether this record was too aggressive a document or not. It's an extremely aggressive record, but it's also an extremely classical record. The idea was to make it recognizable, make it easy to digest, so it grabs you by the face and don't let go, it bites you like a big old bulldog but it's not a beast you haven't heard before."
You can hear all of this and more on the new Re-Birth record enclosed herein--great new songs like "You Move You Lose", "Whop!", "Rollin'", "Shake Them Titties" and "Buck", which are sure to enter the contemporary brass band repertoire; the popular Cannonball Adderley/Joe Zawinul tune "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", a brass band staple all over town; and "Just A Little While To Stay Here", an old spiritual number which has been played on the streets of New Orleans for more years than one can count.
The Re-Birth rhythm section of Philip Frazier (tuba), his brother Keith Frazier (bass drum), and the great Ajay Mallory (snare drum) has never kicked any harder, Roderick 'Claude' Paulin's indefatiguable tenor saxophone shines throughout, and the new brass section with Kenneth Terry and Glenn Andrews (trumpets), Reg Stewart and Tyrus Chapman (trombones) acquits itself without fail, aided and abetted by the sturdy sound of trumpet stalwart Kermit Ruffins.
If you can't be here where the music comes from, rollin' with the Re-Birth Brass Band in the mighty Sixth Ward, this record will bring the sound and the fury, the energy and the fun of a Re-Birth performance straight to you, wherever you may be. And hey, that's just about all you can ask for.
--New Orleans
June 1994
(C) 1994, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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