more here:
HMB with Maelle act 1

and here:
in Paris at l'International

We love these kids!




Thank you Leland and Gray Middle School Band!  You ROCK!!!

From: "Fabrizio degli Pink Puffers"
Date: July 18, 2006 3:00:58 PM EDT
To: "michele lee"
Subject: Certaldo

WOW! you play in the coolest band in the world!
but, yes, we have to start from the beginning.

I arrived in Certaldo in tuesday afternoon (a week ago... it passed away so quickly!), at 8 p.m., and starting to look for the HMB in the center of the little city. It appeared some minutes later, with the sousa player playing Bumper with the power i needed to listen, so loud... i picked up my tuba and started playing, and from the firt notes i felt like being in the right place in the right moment.

Etienne is a wonderful sousa player from Ouiches Loraine[*], and as well as every French player he liked to be dressed in strange ways, there he was dressed as a bride. There was also an euphonium player, and i didn't understand who she was, but she was nice, and perfectly into your style. Emily, she was Etienne girlfriend (damn!) (eh eh eh). So, i met them first because i was in the back. When hungry marchers recognized me they've been really warm. "Thank you for coming!" "You'll save us!"... ehm, i would like to say "guys, are you're sure?"

i was there to have fun with the HMB, and they were thanking me... this was strange.

So, we played the first night, great hugs, new people, and Quincy speaking italian (and not only him). It's difficult to explain it in another language, but i felt like to stay with people i know from a lot of years, as well as to be in great family where i was the far brother coming back home, adn that was really great to me.

As you know, i'm anable to speak english in a dignified way. And you know i'm more then speaking unable to understand what english people say. But with that atmosphere it didn't seem a problem, and i had a sort of courage trying to listen them (perhaps it was the wine, so much wine Michele, and beer, i'm never drunk, but on friday night...ugh!). I continue speaking you about language, because to me is an important chapter of a vacation, my first vacation in Italy but in english, it was strange. So, there are some people i can understand very well. Sasha 100%, Sara Valentine 80%, Sebastian 120%, Billy 150%, perhaps he was the one i understood better than everyone other (what a great think to meet Billy, your pig in person, "i'm Michele's pig!", and he's so funny and happy, a nice person, and Tania too), then there were people i understood more or less, and people impossible to be understood: Jean Emma as well as Johnny, and moreover Greg Squared. It was extremely funny when Johnny spoke and Sebastian worked as a translator from english to english, and when Johnny said something we didn't understand, then sebastian repeated and we understood perfectly, with the same words, and johnny became mad, and we laughed (we, meaning me and other boys from a little city close to Certaldo, among them there were the perfect sosia of Caterina, really impressing). The most strange word Johnny used has been "Etruscans", and he thought i didn't know who Etruscans were, but i only were unable to understand the word. Then, we were in my car going in the "cottage" of a Fiati Sprecati's members (all his family is in fiati and now in another band, called Scorribanda, whose members are moreover really young boys, from 10 to 20 years old), Sebastian said "Etruscans", i understood and Johnny tried the suicide.

During the first night i understood the sound HMB needed from my tuba, so when Etienne went back in France (me and Sasha drived him to take the train in Pisa on wednesday night at 3.00 a.m., so Sasha drived my car and i had a long talking with her, perhaps that's been the first time i had no fear to talk with an english speaker, and doing it in a relaxed way is the best way... but now Sara Valentine is going to phone me, and i'm a bit afraid because perhaps i'm not able to speak english by phone, but i have to try), sorry, i was talking about the sound. In thursday i was the only tuba, and not having a sousaphone i had to understand how to have the right sound, and after Blue Pepper, the first song we started to play, Bloody Richard said "you definitively pass the test!" and that's been great to me, then also Chris (i believed, i don't know way, he was Sara's brother...) said congratulations, and i was proud, now Chris and Sara are in Naples and they'll arrive in Rome on saturday to come playing with Titubanda in Palestrina, they'll stay here in my place.

Certaldo has been funny but very very tiring, because as i said i had to study, so i started studying at 9.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. more or less, then we went to Certaldo (we stayed in a hostel 4 miles away from Certaldo) and we played from 8.30 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. and then from 11.30 p.m. to 12.30 p.m., having dinner at 1.00 a.m. and then staying in a courtyard until to 5.00, besides the boys in my room were funny (we tied sleeping Richard to the bed with four linens, he was drunk so he didn't awake, and he had the surprise when he awoke some hour later, and he took his revenge hiding my tuba, my wallet, my car key, my baggage, my soap... for many hours, and i was worried because sometimes he seem to be really crazy! but it has been amazing).

However, you understood i slept three hours every night, and yesterday we came back (Sasha drived, now we're in Rome, she'll leave Rome tomorrow) and i had to finish my work, so i stayed up to 2.00 a.m. and today i get up at 5.00 to read the last things...
Today i had my exam (a bureaucratic exam) that will allow me to work as a doctor, it has been good, but i don't know the score i obtained (perhaps in a week) but it was easy, and noe I'M ON HOLIDAY!!!

...

ciao,
F.


[* Etienne is the sousaphone player from the Paris-based band Ouiches Lorraine - he played with the March Band for the first part of the tour while Joe and Barker sat home and knitted a new pair of hose. -ed.]

Josh Kun, whoever he so wonderfully is, wrote a so-right-on article about global brass for this weekend's New York Times. Maybe soon we will not be able to call it the clandestine global brass underground anymore, as it creeps aboveground and into the Arts section...


www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/arts/music/09kun.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


April 9, 2006
Music

They're With the Band, Speaking That Global Language: Brass
By JOSH KUN


LAST December, the veteran Mexican-American rock band Los Lobos dusted off its 1992 album "Kiko" and performed it live, start to finish, at the House of Blues in West Hollywood. For most of the night it was a standard rock setup, but when it came time for the album closer, a woozy Mexican folk swoon called "Rio de Tenampa," Los Lobos brought out Los Cenzontles, a Northern California banda troupe. While Mexican bandas (brass bands) can have as many as 20 members, Los Cenzontles didn't need much more than a tuba, a trumpet, a thudding bass drum and a pair of clarinets to turn the club into a raucous cantina.

Brass band music can have this effect. The stammering pepper-spray of horns, the crisp snaps of snare rolls: it's precise and excessive at once, a joyous emotional tornado awash in spit, sweat and celebration. No wonder it's one of the world's most-spoken musical languages from Serbian villages to Manhattan's bustling "gypsy punk scene" to this year's Grammy Awards, where Kanye West reinvented "Gold Digger" by having a marching band play, running through the aisles. Awareness of international brass styles has blossomed in recent years in the United States, thanks in large part to an increase in domestic album distribution deals and more frequent international concert tours.

"You would think that a brass band, which has no strings at all, would be limited in its sound," said Tamir Muskat, the Israeli-born co-founder of Balkan Beat Box, a new-school crew in New York known for wild live shows that mix Balkan horn blasts with electronic beats. "But it's unbelievable what people manage to do with it. There is a whole world of brass out there."

Listen to enough brass band music whether a slice of Mexican banda or the Romanian group Fanfare Ciocarlia pulling the trigger on a dizzying blast of high-velocity trumpets and you start to hear the history of the world handed back to you in a horn section. Suddenly, Serbia and Romania could be the alternative birthplace of Brazilian frevo; brass flurries from Gypsy bands in Macedonia and Bulgaria could be lost cousins of the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band from India, the Gangbe Brass Band from Benin or any New Orleans jazz troupe.

The connections are more than theoretical. In the 1860's, thousands of former Gypsy slaves fled Romania for the American South, landing in mostly black neighborhoods. The brass music they brought with them, like that of all Balkan countries, can be traced to the Turks, the original band geeks. Last year's "Blowers From the Balkans" compilation (Topic), which unearthed a trove of early 20th-century Balkan brass recordings, spelled it out loud and clear: it was the Ottoman Empire's janissary bands that turned brass into the lingua franca of Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria.

"The Ottoman empire used brass bands to impress the enemy, walking and playing in front of the first line of soldiers," explained Oprica Ivancea, the lead clarinetist for Fanfare Ciocarlia, a 12-piece band of Romany Gypsies who work out of the remote mountain town of Zece Prajini (population 400) in eastern Romania. "But in the early 19th century, brass got popular in Germany and Austria and because Romanians always want to be like the Germans we began to adapt to their sound as well."

Long before Kelly Clarkson and Jay-Z (and for that matter, long before rock 'n' roll), European military and church bands were the world's top global musical exports. Locals throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas were trained in the ways of the marching band as part of colonialism. As empires dissolved, official bands soon became voluntary village bands, and by the turn of the 20th century most of the world shared an ingrained knowledge of all things brass.

"All brass bands have a link somewhere," Mr. Muskat said. "Ninety percent of all brass bands are based on the same elements. It's all rhythm and horns."

Mr. Muskat's Balkan Beat Box partner Ori Kaplan grew up in Jaffa, Israel, where he watched Egyptian orchestras on television and learned to play Eastern European klezmer clarinet from a Bulgarian trained by Gypsy brass musicians. When Mr. Kaplan moved to New York 15 years ago, though, he wanted nothing of his klezmer past, choosing instead to play in industrial punk bands. That all changed when he heard a CD from Macedonia's top brass band, Kocani Orkestar, and learned about the Gypsy-Turkish fusions of the Bulgarian horn stalwart Yuri Yunakov, another New York City transplant). "I started to listen to Balkan music constantly," Mr. Kaplan said, "I became a brass band freak."

Of brass band enthusiasts in the United States, however, few can top the trumpeter Frank London, whose Klezmer Brass All-Stars have just released their third raucous manifesto of brass globalization, "Carnival Conspiracy." While firmly grounded in both Balkan and klezmer traditions (Mr. London's main gig is with the tradition-bending Klezmatics), "Carnival" makes cross-cultural brass connection its guiding impulse, riffing on the beer hall oompah of Mexican banda and the funk marches of Brazilian frevo and batucada. If the batucada seems like a stretch, it shouldn't: the first Jews in North America were Eastern European immigrants from Recife, Brazil the capital of Brazilian big band.

"The idea of brass repertoires crossing genres and being assimilated into different traditions has been going on in all of these brass band musics forever," said Mr. London, who in the 1980's also fronted Les Misrables Brass Band, playing music from Pakistan, Serbia and South America (as well as the occasional Jimi Hendrix cover). "For many years, the most popular song for Indian brass bands was 'Tequila.' When you play an Italian feast, you don't just do Italian parade music. At the end you sit down and play opera overtures, then you can do covers of popular music, dance music, jazz music. Most brass bands just have this breadth of repertoire and styles at their fingertips."

Fanfare Ciocarlia have made a career out of this kind of stylistic juggling. They play everything from Russian-influenced Romanian doinas (slow improvised melodies) to Gypsy maneas (melancholy love songs) born in India, and on their latest CD, "Gili Garabdi," tackle an Afro-Cuban rumba alongside versions of the James Bond theme and Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's "Caravan."

"We play music and dances we learned from our fathers," said Mr. Ivancea, who considers Gili Garabdi a tribute to the shared heritage of Gypsy brass and African-American jazz. "But we also play any tune requested during a wedding or baptism. We provide a service we have to play what people want to hear."

In 2003, Mr. London decided to test these theories of a single brass family tree on an actual collaboration. So on the Klezmer Brass All-Stars' sophomore outing, "Brotherhood of Brass," he sought out the Hasaballa Brass Band from Cairo and Boban Markovic, a Serbian trumpet king, for a series of reeling geography mashups that imagined Eastern European shtetls and Egyptian markets sprouting up in Serbian villages.

"Over the last few years, I've noticed that my music has become part of a larger global conversation," said Mr. Markovic, who has been known to start his live sets with a version of the theme from "Titanic." "Knowing someone's music is so much easier these days. But I am still mostly trying to communicate with local people, especially communities in the south of Serbia and in the Balkans."

In that spirit, Mr. Markovic's newest album, "The Promise," features his typically kaleidoscopic takes on standard coceks (stomping Gypsy dance tunes), but also dips into the Latin American brass band tradition with "Latino" and "Voz," songs that wouldn't sound out of place on the set list of a Mexican banda. Which makes perfect sense considering that the Mexican brass style one of the most commercially dominant genres in that country's music industry was initially inspired by the Franco-Austrian military bands that reached Mexico through the coastal hub of Mazatln in the 1800's.

"Our brass music is very similar to German music," said Poncho Lizrraga of Banda el Recodo, Mexico's longest-running brass ensemble, founded by Mr. Lizrraga's father, Don Cruz, in 1938. "We just interpreted it differently, turned the polkas into our own rancheras. My father wanted something different from all that music coming from Europe. It was music just for our town, and in the beginning, mostly for people who liked to spend too much time in the cantinas."

More than six decades and 180 albums later (their latest, "Hay Amor," has just been released), Recodo's 17 members are international banda ambassadors who wear matching jewel-studded suits made of black velvet, and their music has become a favorite sample source for hip-hop and electronic acts like Akwid from Los Angeles, Wakal from Mexico City and Nortec Collective from Tijuana. Similarly, the growing popularity of Balkan brass with sample-hunting D.J.'s in the United States and Europe led by Shantel of Germany, whose "Bucovina Club" nights in Frankfurt ignited an electro-Balkan avalanche which has been a key factor in introducing the centuries-old music to first-time listeners.

On Shantel's new "Bucovina Club Vol. 2" mix CD, Balkan Beat Box makes an appearance, and he throws a few house beats under cuts from Fanfare Ciocarlia and Mahala Rai Banda, another Romanian band, but mostly he lets the old-school originals speak for themselves: the traditional as the new cutting-edge.

"People are tired of corporate-friendly rock 'n' roll and the cold nihilism of the electronic music scene," said Mr. Kaplan of Balkan Beat Box. "They're hungry for this really sweaty, personal, alcohol-driven, familiar, ceremony-like music. There's something very healthy about all of this interest in brass music. People just want to get back in touch with their feelings."

From: Strapponzo
Date: Sat Apr 1, 2006 11:57 am
Subject: happy april fool's day, you goats benh@...

So last night i went to the Shunjuku part of Tokyo, came out of the
subway into a times-squarish capitol of frlshing blinking capitalist
hell, and stumbled through some small streets of alternating
porno-pachinko casinos and tourist restaurants roasting radioactive
shrimp the size of squirrels, until i found the bar called Mars, where
Junko and Cyclub were playing.

The place was filled with youthful creatures smoking cigarettes under
their hoods. Junko zipped past me, stopped, looked at me for a few
moments, realized why I was there, gave a big smile, and then whispered
in my ear "I have to save my voice. We talk after, " and disappeared.
Then a non-guy said "Hi mate" and so I figured he was in Cyclub. I told
him why I know Junko via HMB and he bugged out like I had just revealed
myself to be Jimi Hendrix's washboard player. His name is Sam. He asked
me to play with them and found an extra drum. Said I should jump on
stage for last song in the short fast set, called "A cup of tea on the
moon". Then Joe Elvis appeared and we had a warm greeting. Very nice
guy. After the opening noise band (one song, one note, half an hour),
Cyclub started. They were very great, in the tradition of the Pogues,
and way more gypsy punk than Gogol Bordello. On my cue, I strapped the
drum to my belt and jumped onstage and banged on it, flailed my head and
stared at nothing. Five minutes of punk rock glory in Tokyo. i was very
happy.

We hung around for the following bands. A great power trio of black
sabbath reincarnated in small speedy teenagers, called "Green Milk from
the Planet Orange" (http://www.green-milk.com). They played tight speed
metal sitting in folding chairs with heads hunched over guitars the
whole time. They were extraordinarily tight.

Afterwards, Cyclub and I were standing out on the street surrounded by
The Gear, and Junko was playing trumpet. Afterwards Green Milk from
Planet Orange asked us if we wanted to go hang out. They had a little
honda delivery van. We climbed into the back. The inside of the van was
covered with photographs, posters and drawings of goats. There were goat
horns on the dashboard. The floor was covered with goat skins. I felt at
home. We got to an apartment. It had lava lamps, posters of guitar
heros, paradise islands, a TV, video games, etc. We took our shoes off
and sat down on the floor. The bass player brought out a giant frosty
green wine bottle, looked like a sake bottle, and a handful of small
white ceramic cups.
He passed the cups around and looked at me and said
"No alchohol, Don't worry"
I was puzzled and said I wasn't worried. Then he said,
"From goat."
I started to worry.
They poured it and everyone began to drink theirs so I drank mine.
For about two hours, nobody said anything, just looked around the room
expressionless. Then, to no one's surprise, Joe Elvis took out his cell
phone and sent a text message. A phone beeped in the other room and goat
walked out. It was a fat, well groomed goat with a long white beard and
yellow goat-slit eyes, and really big balls and a giant udder. S/he was
looking alert and attentive, relieved and a bit impatient. The goat
walked over to me and said, " Eigo ga wakarima sen" which means
"I dont understand English". Everybody laughed. I felt a sudden flood of confusing emotions, ranging,
in hindsight, from Relief because I understood what he just said, as it
was the first phrase I learned in Japanese, and for a while was the
only, to Anger, because I had travelled all this way and was missing the
April Fool's Day festivities just to be told by a goat that we cannot
discuss any further.

It happened again: That thing we do, this time at the Elder Statespot. It goes without saying that, two days later, the memory is a little blurred, but for certain there was one reputable old man with a rape fixation, nautical weirdness, some big rock. Shockers, also at least one member of the Beefheart clan. Go figure. And now that the tally's been carried, it seems we even hauled some loot for the Old Battered Home. We're saints, I tell you, saints!

That Korntee of the world famous Extra Action Marching Band has done us all a service in the form of a podcast featuring the four bands named in the aforementioned Spin article (not counting Gwen Stefani, et al.). Go have a listen. Tracks are as follows:

1. Extra Action Marching Band - "Black Chicken"
2. Infernal Noise Brigade - "Manguera"
3. Hungry March Band - "Jupanese Ju Ju"
4. March 4th - "Crack Haus"
*intro/outro Concord Blue Devils - "Brick House"

Spin article scans here:
Blood On the Sousaphone 1
Blood On the Sousaphone 2

We continue through dust and heat, inter-social breakdown and occasional mechanical failure.  Only now it seems our activities aren't quite so off the radar as we may have previously suspected.  Indeed, we've been documented. 

You may well recall the episode last summer when we threw down with the Extra Action crew.  Things broke, mayhem followed, bodily fluids spilled.  Now a distant echo of that collision has been recorded in print by no less venerable an institution than Spin magazine.  As always, we don't know where this will lead.

Our ravishing juggernaut is still heaving forward in fits and starts.  This week, after widespread attendance at the once-a-year Balkan Mecca of Manhattan, some of us briefly had a rendezvous with some of the Panorama Crew from the Old Battered Home, and still we're heading for more (and bigger) action on our own.  The March Band Chug Machine (chug-chug) sets up shop for a few hours this Friday in Not-Quite-Manhattan/Not-Really-Brooklyn for further adventure and larfs.  Come smell the magic.