Album of the Week
Brass
bands are the very heart of New Orleans music, a staple of the city's
social life for 150 years and a key element in the creation of jazz.
The tradition has been threatened with extinction several times in the
past, but never as much as since the 2005 flood, when the neighborhoods
that sustained most brass band musicians and the bulk of the music's
followers were completely destroyed, perhaps never to be rebuilt.
Visitors
to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival this year saw numerous
brass bands perform, but many of those musicians had to travel from
their new homes in Atlanta and Houston to play in their birth city. A
fairly accurate measure of how desperate these brass bands are is the
lack of new recordings, particularly from the younger bands that
revitalized the scene before Katrina. In the nearly four years since
the storm there have been no significant new brass band releases.
Which makes Slither Slice,
the new album by the New Orleans Nightcrawlers Brass Band, one of the
most important New Orleans releases this year. The album features
compelling new compositions in the brass band format by a group made up
of some of the top players in the city.
Matt
Perrine, the outstanding sousaphone player with Bonerama, the Tin Men,
Danza Quartet and Royal Fingerbowl, is the fulcrum of this band's
sound, blowing full throated ostinato bass lines that form a rhythmic
counterpoint to Terence "T-Bell" Andrews' bass drum and Derrick Tabb's
snare. Perrine also contributes two vital compositions to the set - the
title track, a dense funk breakdown with support from Galactic's
Stanton Moore on drums and Rich Vogel on keyboards, and the old-timey
"Pontchartrain Beach," with Alex McMurray sitting in on banjo.
The
front line's interlace is astonishing on a pure jazz level with the
paragon jamming brass band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Perrine's
Bonerama bandmate Craig Klein brings his bold trombone figures to the
arrangements while saxophonists Jason Mingledorff and Brent Rose and
trumpeters Barney Floyd and Satoru Ohashi engage in a furious
choreography of funk soloing, at once groove oriented and full of
melodic variety. Mingledorff, the regular reedman with Papa Grows Funk,
plays some of the filthiest lines on his three songs for the set,
"Krewe Cut," "Come Back With It" and "Clean Up." Ohashi also writes two
tunes on the album, the good-time chant "8th Ward Strut" and the album-closing spectacular "Okinawa."
"Hold
‘Em Joe" is a traditional brass band/Mardi Gras Indian chant that gets
enough of a novel arrangement here to merit the Nightcrawlers taking
writers' credit for it. But that's about as close to traditional as
this extraordinarily creative band gets.
Brass
bands, especially the younger ones, are known for their ability to work
unusual material into their repertoire, but none of them have come up
with as novel an idea as using the fanfare from Guiseppe Verdi's
"Aida," which is tailor made for this treatment.
The
band segues from this glorious theme into a feel-good anthem for New
Orleans' recovery, "Alright Alright." If more groups can come up with
new material this good the title of that song will be prophetic.
Funding
for this album came from the non-profit New Orleans music support group
the Threadheads, who have also financed great releases from John
Boutte, Paul Sanchez, Glen David Andrews, Alex McMurray and Shamarr
Allen. Copies can be purchased at www.neworleansnightcrawlers.
