Post 440: THE EXTRA CRISPY BRASS BAND

I discovered The Extra Crispy Brass Band during explorations on YouTube recently. I had not previously come across this group.

I enjoyed what I heard. And a good thing about this band is that its members are relatively young.

I have since found out - easily enough from the internet - that the band was formed in 2011 and is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That's more than 1000 miles north of New Orleans; or, to put it another way, it's on the west shore of Lake Michigan, about 90 miles north of Chicago.

The Extra Crispy Brass Band aims to play in the tradition of such New Orleans brass bands as The Dirty Dozen and The Olympia. Indeed, the band was founded and is led by trombonist Gregory Cramer, who used to live in New Orleans.

As is common practice with brass bands, there are no chord players (banjo or guitar) but they double up with two trumpets, two trombones and have at least one saxophone. The percussion (two players) is the essential department. Such bands of course usually have as their basis great rhythms laid down by the drummers and sousaphone, generating pulsating riffy excitement. This band certainly works that way.

For a well-made video to give you some idea of their appearance and sound, CLICK HERE - where they are playing Royal Garden Blues.

Or CLICK HERE for sounds even more typical of the street parade bands.

Post 255: FROM BRASS BAND TO EARLY JAZZ BAND

Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, there were hundreds of small bands such as this one scattered throughout the United States of America.

Such bands could contain cornets, tubas, percussion, trombones, clarinets, saxophones - and sometimes stringed instruments.

Very often they played for dances, where of course they had to keep a strict tempo and were required to play the tune through four or five times in succession, maybe with different instruments taking the melody with each change of chorus.

It's easy to imagine how players must sometimes have felt like pepping the music up a bit, partly out of boredom. Add to this the influence of cakewalk music and the developing craze for ragtime and we can see how easily jazz must have been born.

Jack Laine's Reliance Brass Band
in New Orleans, 1910

The emergence from bands such as those photographed above of this early Twentieth-Century jazz band is not difficult to imagine.