Brass in the
Present Tense
The ReBirth Brass Band takes it to the streets on its new CD.
By Alaine K. Azcona
WHO: ReBirth Brass Band
WHEN: 5:50 p.m. Sunday, April 29
WHERE: House of Blues/Old School 102.9 Stage
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On Hot Venom, the ReBirth Brass Band dabbles in hip-hop, and earned a parental advisory label in the process.
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While many locals complain that the “jazz” in Jazz Fest is little more than a pretext for the “Fest” as of late, nobody dances to the rhythm of semantics. For the famously upbeat ReBirth Brass Band the controversy is immaterial; Jazz Fest is the ultimate gig, pure and simple. “Jazz Fest is our reward,” says Philip Frazier, ReBirth’s tuba player and unassuming leader. “We figure we go around the world so much, we spread the word, and at Jazz Fest all those people come to see us on our own turf. When we see that big crowd — man, that’s enough energy for us to do anything.”
Like Jazz Fest, ReBirth must confront the disparate demands of success, struggling to keep tabs on that ever-elusive concept called “fun” without abandoning tradition. ReBirth’s new CD, Hot Venom (Mardi Gras Records), reveals a more complex and confrontational version of the Fest favorite. This alter ego offers a bold charter for the future of brass band music and the traditions that surround it.
The history of the brass band is intertwined with the “social aid & pleasure club,” and together they conjure up the antiquated image of a solemn procession of proud people dressed in their Sunday best, shuffling forward to the rhythm of the band. Ajay Mallery, the snare drummer for ReBirth, used to watch the secondlines from the steps of his childhood home. “It never did interest me,” he recalls. “It was quite boring — back then, brass bands were an older thing — only parents and grandparents.”
When Philip and Keith Frazier began playing traditional brass band music in 1983, social aid and pleasure clubs and the second-line parades they sponsored were on the verge of becoming an anthropological footnote. Still, the Frazier brothers had no trouble finding inspiration, and they combined the intensity of the Dirty Dozen with a youthful sense of adventure to create a new kind of brass band, simultaneously innovative and irreverent; from the beginning ReBirth was willing to incorporate everything from R&B to television jingles into its music. With Kermit Ruffins as the front man, ReBirth fueled a resurgence of interest in brass band music with far-reaching effects.
In the recent documentary Let Me Do My Thang, filmmaker Keith Reynaud captures the striking contrast between the staid secondline procession of yesteryear and the raucous rolling block party that it is today. The ReBirth Brass Band deserves credit for revitalizing the secondline and for inspiring a new generation of like-minded bands. But ReBirth’s success has pulled them in several directions: on tour as the quintessential New Orleans brass band for festival-goers worldwide; at the Maple Leaf as the mind-altering substance of choice for Tulane and Loyola students; and in the secondline as the bastion of New Orleans’ street culture. If We Come to Party (1997) was a nod to their world-music-festival fan base, and The Main Event: Live at the Maple Leaf (1999) was a tribute to their college following,
then their newest album, Hot Venom, is a long-overdue homage to the streets that inspire them.
By incorporating hip-hop in sound and in sentiment, Hot Venom has the dubious honor of being ReBirth’s first album to warrant a parental advisory label.
The label will come as a shock to many fans, who had grown comfortable with ReBirth’s signature covers of Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye. But after playing virtually every day for 18 years, ReBirth had begun to lose its edge. Its music seemed less like an exciting departure from tradition and more like the emergence of a new, equally intransient tradition. For many young people the brass band tradition both begins and ends with ReBirth, period.
“Whenever you’re an innovator of something new, if you want to stay that way, you have to constantly challenge barriers,” explains saxophonist Roderick Paulin, who played with ReBirth for six years before leaving in 1997 to pursue a solo career. It was time for ReBirth to re-establish itself at the vanguard of New Orleans music.
“We get our energy, our motivation [and] our creativity from the streets,” Mallery says. “As long as we are connected with home and the people, we don’t have any worries. A lot of people are going to be shocked, but hey — it’s all about trying to get the music out.” To ReBirth’s credit, the music differs from their earlier work only in the quality of their performance and the extent to which individual talents can be heard against the formidable rhythm section. The compositions are more ambitious and the horn arrangements tighter, underscored to great effect by Derrick Shezbie on trumpet and the recent addition of Revert Andrews as the band’s third trombonist. Revert’s cousin Glen Andrews distinguishes himself as the lone author of “Doing Bad,” one of the album’s most driven pieces. Saxophonist James Durant provides his usual smooth and seemingly effortless solos throughout the album.
Hot Venom also marks ReBirth’s coming-of-age as vocalists, both with sophisticated a cappella harmony and strong solo performances. Trombonist Tyrus Chapman in particular emerges as a force to be reckoned with vocally and lyrically, and his performance on “Let Me Do My Thing” is the musical climax of Hot Venom. As the thematic sequel to the definitive ReBirth anthem “Do Whatcha Wanna” (in which they regularly replace the original refrain with “smoke marijuana”), “Let Me Do My Thing” takes a tone toward partying that is not so lighthearted: “Will I ever be a man?/ Will I ever ever ever maintain?/ Stop frying my brain?” Phil and Keith Frazier have seen this drama play out many times over the course of their long careers.
“You see all these things going on around you,” Keith explains. “At some point you have to say, ‘No, I can’t do this.’ You have to have a lot of internal discipline.” The temperate Frazier brothers have asked several people to leave the band over the years because of drinking and drug use. “Let Me Do My Thing” addresses this ongoing struggle with gut-wrenching honesty. “When I sing,” Chapman says, “I want people to feel like they’re in church and I’m the preacher.”
The musicianship on Hot Venom provides the backdrop for ReBirth’s first foray into hip-hop, though the lyrics are at
times far cruder than the instrumentals
are refined.
Philip Frazier believes that the music on Hot Venom remains true to the brass band tradition. “We’re not really doing hip-hop, we’re just adding on hip-hop lyrics,” Frazier says. Bass drummer Keith Frazier explains further: “We’re musicians, we’re not rappers. So we said, ‘Let’s do it the right way and bring some real rappers in and see what happens.’ Shooting, stabbing, killing — that’s what they see and that’s what they rap about.”
In the foreboding song “You Don’t Want to Go to War,” No Limit artist Soulja Slim addresses the recent surge of violence at secondlines, with an unequivocal call for peace. His language, though relatively benign, still seems at odds with the Marley-riffing ReBirth: “Y’all don’t want to go to war/ Y’all ain’t about this/ ‘Cause I got niggas that know where ya house is.” Nevertheless, with “You Don’t Want to Go to War,” ReBirth aggressively asserts its relevance to contemporary urban life, albeit through a translator.
Regrettably, the song “Pop that Pussy” belies the socially relevant message of “You Don’t Want to Go to War.” The lyrics of Baton Rouge rapper Cheeky Blakk begin with the unprintable and quickly descend into the unthinkable. Set against the diabolically infectious melody of “La Macarena,” this song is sure to be the cause of more than a few detentions if ReBirth succeeds in attracting younger fans.
“Nothing is offensive to these kids anymore — they’re desensitized,” reasons Derrick Freeman, drummer for the funk band Cronk, who toured Colorado with ReBirth last year. “The music of New Orleans in 2001 is reflective of the Cash Money and No Limit vibe, and ReBirth is very much a part of that.” ReBirth accordingly makes its own contribution toward the parental advisory label, most notably by reworking LeVert’s “Casanova” into “Bitchbendova.”
“People have been asking us to record that song for five years now,” says trombonist Tyrus Chapman, who is generally regarded as the creative force behind ReBirth’s new hip-hop sensibility. “That’s how we do it in the secondline. We have to look out for the streets, too. If that’s what they want, that’s what we give them.” Philip Frazier acknowledges that as a father, he has some reservations about the language. “I couldn’t call my worst enemy a bitch — I can barely say the word,” he admits. “But that’s how people talk. We got to keep
it young.”
The members of ReBirth are not oblivious to the advisory label’s appeal for adolescents and their spending power, but they also seem to have a genuine desire to pass on the brass band tradition, in one form or another, to the next generation.
“African Americans have always been musicians,” says Keith Frazier, “and right now the tradition of black people playing musical instruments is dying. So we try to keep it young, alive. Everybody wants to be a hip-hop artist or a football star. We try to tell them that there’s something else you can be; you can be a musician, and you can make a decent living. Everyone will not make it to the NFL; everyone will not be a Master P, so they need to have alternatives. Music is something they can get into, something positive.”
Philip Frazier is also thinking about what ReBirth’s legacy will be. “At one time [the secondline] was all black, but not anymore. ReBirth is the cause of that — alright for the ’Birth — now the melting pot is really being a melting pot, which is great. A lot of people say our city’s racist. Maybe it is, but when it comes to the music part, the culture and the festivals, everybody’s on the same page, and that’s the beautiful side.” .
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