Balkan Brass and Brass the World Over

This post reflects on Too Many Zooz, Moon Hooch, Youngblood Brass Band, and other various nonsense popular brass ensembles. I've loved Youngblood Brass Band since my freshman year of high school, when a trumpet player in the band started blasting it in his car when we were driving around. Nat Mcintosh's playing, and the bombastic nature of the band (with its New Orleans influences) kept me dancing around the basement like a good high school kid should. I tried transcribing and imitating Nat's playing, got a couple right notes down for the trumpet and trombone parts in a few songs, and was eventually invited to play sousaphone on Brooklyn with my high school's jazz band. I remember being terrified, but I did alright for a high-energy high school kid looking at a wall of unfamiliar ink and chord changes on the solo section. My hype song in Junior year was YBB's Under Your Influence. I still haven't figured out the lyrics entirely. Since then, I've joine

To start off this blog, I figure it's best to start where my fascination with Balkan music did: the poppin' Balkan Brass Band. A friend introduced me to them in high school, and I've been in love ever since. Their charts range from traditional Balkan brass music to arrangements of pop tunes like Mission Impossible, and their playing is bombastic and soulful. Being in high school, the concept of mixed meter blew my budding 16-year-old musician mind. Thus we find Kerta Mangae Dae. The non-Western scales of Slavic countries also caught my young ear. Slavic Soul Party's Opa Cupa combines an insistent beat with entrancing vocals to produce on of my favorite tracks to this date. Not to mention the dirty triple tonguing in the trumpets and the fat oom-pah laid down by that raunchy low brass section. Finish it all off with an accordion solo and you've got yourself a certified bop.

From July 21st through August 2nd of this year, I studied with the Atlantic Brass Quintet at their Seminar, hosted at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. During the seminar, I was placed in a quintet and assigned different pieces of standard quintet repertoire to read, rehearse, and perform. Each week, the quintet was coached for 4 hours a day, each hour with a different coach from the quintet or its colleagues. The coaches focused on musical interpretation, instrumental technique, and chamber musicianship. Each coach approached the repertoire from a different perspective and drew different ideas out of the quintet's playing. The coachings and rehearsals culminated with a student recital on Friday, where the groups at the seminar performed their pieces. I'm proud of the performances I was a part of - the Braeburn Brass put together Plog's Four Sketches during week 1, and Shane Endsley's Declamatory Ascent for week 2 . Before the student recitals, on Thursd