Making love to a Brass Band

 

Tom Benson might be the only person in New Orleans that can't decide if he likes The Brass or not.

True, every person in the city may not agree that this is the best name change for our NBA team, but we're all pretty used to the protocol that if it has to do with our city's brass bands, you just go ahead and like it.

So just in case you're one of the lost souls who have forgotten (or have yet to experience) the magic that this music can provide, here are some lovely words to help you remember.

“Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

We know that Tom describes the relationship between the band and the audience as two lovers making love.
But we're pretty sure he doesn't mean it in the literal sense.
And that trumpet is a little too close for comfort.

If that doesn’t make you want to love on some New Orleans music, we don’t know what will. We’ve found that it doesn’t have to be a brass band in a small club in the back of a neighborhood in order for you to make this connection with the music; sparks will still fly as you connect with TBC welcoming you to Bourbon Street or Rebirth Brass Band rocking a crowd at Jazz Fest. Regardless of where you feel it, a brass band is something to be felt.  

So even though the Trombone Shorty concert tonight at Wednesday at the Square is going to be less of ‘two lovers making love’ and more of a ‘full on orgy in a park’ we still can’t wait to play our part in the magic. And don’t let the heat keep you away tonight, everyone knows the best kind of love making sessions are the sweaty ones.  



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“Laissez les bon temps rouler”

          - The New Orleans Jazz Hornets Brass