Starting with a parade from Kennedy Plaza at about 5 pm, What Cheer? will be joined by Titubanda (from Rome); the Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble (Montreal); Loyd Family Players (Oakland); March Fourth Marching Band (Portland, Oregon); Brass Liberation Orchestra (San Francisco); and Hungry March Band (Brooklyn) in staging a 7 pm show at AS220 (115 Empire Street; admission $10,). Some of the same groups will perform at 9 pm at the Providence Black Repertory Company (276 Westminster St.).
Get honky
Although the music of most of the current crop of street bands, including What Cheer? Brigade, is not overtly political, many of them grew out of the protest movement that announced its arrival at the boisterous World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle in the late ’90s.
Lydia Stein, a Providence resident who plays with the Cambridge-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, for example, says that that outfit began following protests against the start of the Iraq war in 2003. The Honk! Festival, meanwhile, which started in 2006, grew from the recognition “that there were other bands like us all over the place, and wouldn’t it be great to get together?”
Stein, an organizer of the festival, points to the deep-rooted community history of marching bands, like those popularly associated with jazz funerals in New Orleans. The current street groups mix various traditions and influences, drawing from the old school, hippie stuff (Vermont’s Bread and Puppet festival), and more recent counter-cultural events and genres, such as Burning Man and noise-rock.
“It’s loose, but absolutely very much connected to working with social justice in a way that celebrates and rejoices,” Stein says. “It’s sort of reclaiming music from consumer culture.” Many of the like-minded groups offer a “take on a sort of old-fashioned vaudevillian burlesque, like an old-fashioned show.”
This inclusiveness can be seen in how this weekend’s Honk! Festival will be the first to include an on-the-spot pickup band. Street bands tend to have fluid memberships — a reflection, Stein says, of how they defy expectations about a requirement for particular talents. Instead, “It’s more of a question of what we can accomplish together.”
The common emphasis of the sound is on brass horns and drums, a combination that Stein calls “really familiar. People are drawn to it almost instinctively,” she says, and though it packs an oomph, “it doesn’t assault you” in the way that ultra-loud club music might.
While the street band subgenre exemplified by What Cheer? Brigade has grown in number and reach over the last 10 or 15 years, just how it began remains a murky subject.
“Maybe it’s a social response to a sense of impending doom,” Stein theorizes. “Maybe the new millennium is inspiring people to come together.”
Ken Field, who leads the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, a brass funk band in Boston, recalls Jumbo, a bygone group in that city that also mixed brass instruments, a circus feeling, and a punk attitude.
“I can’t tell you why it started,” he says of the spread of similar bands, “but what I think is happening, people on one hand are reacting to the DIY approach, kind of taking the talents they learned in grade school, and trying to make popular music with it. It’s amazing how many of these bands are springing up all over the country, all over the world, with instruments that they can play anywhere.”
