Dirty Dozen Brass Band :: 2016:01.17 :: Brooklyn Bowl
Dirty Dozen Brass Band are above all reassuring — the visual panorama of all those horns and
Kirk Joseph’s mighty sousaphone, the effortless funk and groove that would tell you “New Orleans” even if you didn’t know any better, the honest, hot-damn tradition of the nearly 40(!)-year-old band. They lit up a cold Sunday night in Brooklyn by doing what they always do: entertain and stir up a soul-nourishing ruckus. The shared commitment to celebrating New Orleans brass-band traditions while also subverting them with funk and all kinds of other flavors has kept the band whole.
A number of core members, including trumpeter
Gregory Davis, sousaphonist Joseph, tenor-saxophonist
Kevin Harris, baritone-saxophonist
Roger Lewis, and trumpeter
Efrem Towns, have been in the Dirty Dozen since the beginning or close to it. But listening to guitarist
Takeshi Shimmura or drummer
Julian Addison — much more recent additions — convinces you they are as much a state of mind as a lineup. Shimmura ripped a solo during the gospel-dusted
“Tomorrow” that was so fierce yet a piece of everything else happening that you realized only long after it ended that it felt part of the fabric, not the least bit tacked on in a way that might suggest “new guy.”
That’s how the whole set went. The band didn’t begin and finish tunes so much as enter and exit them, spinning up grooves and jams, letting one or more members drive, cycling through guest percussion and trumpet players, enabling looseness in a way that wasn’t the least bit sloppy, true to the
Tremé way.
“Red Hot Mama,” “My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now,” and the girls invited up to dance were evidence of a well-worn show craft and genuinely honored tradition. Dirty Dozen do both. The same might be said of opening act
the Record Company, an emerging trio with a hard-boogieing streak of blues running through it like an electrical current. What a fun band this is — Chris Vos, bassist Alex Stiff, drummer Marc Cazorla — coming to life like a mutant
John Lee Hooker combo. The Dirty Dozen might see something of themselves in such goosing of traditions: love of what makes them traditions without letting them become museum pieces.
—Chad Berndtson | @cberndtson