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CMU Reviews @ London Jazz Festival Festival Reviews
Live Review: Brassroots’ Brass Band Bash at London Jazz Festival on 13 Nov
By CMU Editorial | Published on Sunday 14 November 2010
This was a festival within a festival really, held at Rich Mix on Bethnal Green Road and lasting a good eleven hours. Arranged by Jerome Harper, who also played trombone, it featured eight brass bands from across London, with the Soul Rebels from New Orleans as special guests, and was designed to demonstrate the variety and ability of the brass bands currently playing in the capital.
The proceedings began with the Bollywood Brass Band playing a fifteen minute street set on near by Brick Lane. After rustling up a few followers, they led a procession back to the venue, where they proceeded to put on a brilliant opening set. Truly a spectacle to behold, dressed as they were in black baggy trousers and tops with wide red sashes around their waists, their performance included dances ranging from side to side swaying to coordinated line dancing, and a turn by the portly guy playing the tuba that involved charging at the audience and then, still hunched, zooming around the entire venue (a move I can’t recall having seen in any Bollywood movie). They were a lot of fun and played several classic Bollywood songs, notably the Bhangra track ‘Love Is Sweeter Than Sugar’.
Another brilliant set came from The Brass Volcanoes, a young seven-piece with a cheeky, confident manner. They mixed traditional jazz with ska and funk, and interspersed their set with group trips from stage to dance floor where they cosied up to some of the movers down there while still playing their tunes. A notable performance came with Willard Wright’s ‘Old Man River’, a spiritual track that started with band members respectfully listening to the trombonist’s hanging melodies, but ended in bedlam with James Evans on the alto sax jumping around and tooting one of the finest and most frenetic solos of the day. Another track that raised a smile was ‘Yellow Bird’, where the only band member who actually knew the lyrics was the admirably determined tuba player, with the rest of them reading the words in tuneless monotone hunched over music sheets. Towards the end, the scope of the music extended to rap as they delivered the message “don’t throw away your plastic bags ‘coz a whale might eat them” in a lively last number. The volcanoes are a bubbling cauldron of imagination and fun.
Other performances on the day came from trad jazz band Sunshine Kings, twelve-tone brass band Oompah Brass, the aforementioned Soul Rebels Brass Band from the US of A, and Brassroots, the band after whom the whole mini-festival was named. The Brassroots set was pulsating and the audience bopped, screamed and jumped for their covers of White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’, Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’ and ‘Miserlou’ from the ‘Pulp Fiction’ soundtrack. Overall, the festival was a triumphant celebration of London’s top brass.
