The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Celebrating over 45 years since their founding in 1977, the Grammy Award-winning New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band has taken the traditional foundation of brass band music and incorporated it into a blend of genres, including bebop jazz, funk, and R&B/soul. This unique sound, described by the band as a “musical gumbo”, has allowed the Dirty Dozen to tour across five continents and more than thirty countries, record twelve studio albums, and collaborate with a range of artists from Modest Mouse to Widespread Panic to Norah Jones. Forty-five plus years later, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band is a world-famous music machine whose name is synonymous with genre-bending romps and high-octane performances.
In 1977, the Dirty Dozen Social Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans began showcasing a traditional Crescent City brass band. It was a joining of two proud but antiquated traditions at the time: social aid and pleasure clubs dated back over a century to a time when Black southerners could rarely afford life insurance, and the clubs would provide proper funeral arrangements. Brass bands, early predecessors of jazz as we know it, would often follow the funeral procession playing somber dirges, then once the family of the deceased was out of earshot, burst into jubilant dance tunes as casual onlookers danced in the streets. By the late '70s, few of either existed. The Dirty Dozen Social Aid and Pleasure Club decided to assemble this group as a house band, and over the course of these early gigs, the seven-member ensemble adopted the venue's name: The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
Fanfaraï
Fanfaraï offers a truly human, musical, and cultural experience. These nine musicians of various cultural backgrounds revisit, in their own ways, the tradition of festive wanderings. This original band, born in 2005 and based in France, plays North African music by blending skillfully traditional percussions, brass, Arab-Berber, Afro-Cuban, Latin, and Jazz sounds. From the street to the stage, there is just one step for this colorful orchestra, which offers a very festive and generous show. Fanfaraï plunges us into a rousing and emotional musical ambience.
Fanfaraï emerged in 2005 under the direction of Samir Inal. After creating Ziyara, a traditional Algerian street band in 2000, he met with musicians coming from jazz and salsa bands and decided to reconfigure with them the traditional and popular repertoire of a brass band. Fanfaraï goes along the same line as the tradition of these street orchestras, called "Idbalen" or "Zernadjia" that animated rituals and feasts in Algeria from the beginning of the century till the 1970's. Idbalen was common in the Berber region, Algiers, and its surroundings. These bands used to perform in public squares, streets, and mausoleums during the feast of local saints. Inseparable from festive events, these street musicians used Tbel (drums), Ghaita (flute), and Tbilette (small drum or tambourine), Derbouka, Guellal, and Kerkabou according to their region. Fanfaraï combined the saxophones, trumpets, trombone, drums, keyboards, and bass with traditional percussion, readapted the repertoire for all these instruments, and introduced Afro-Cuban, Latin, Turkish, and jazz influences. The North African music was never played this way (with a brass band), and this is what makes Fanfaraï so original and the project so successful.
The music of Fanfaraï is a cheerful combination that is as interesting as the diversity of cultures and trajectories of the musicians themselves. French, North African, and Franco-North African musicians bring their energy and talent together and share their own particular musical heritage with all the other members of the band. The baseline of the repertoire of Fanfarai is Algerian and Moroccan, and each member of the band is free to bring his own influences into it. Fanfarai succeeds with each performance – in the streets or on stages – because they carry the audience away beyond ethnic descent or nationality, towards territories of tolerance, discovery, and pleasure. The band’s third album Raï is not dead! was released in 2018 and gives a good view of their creativity with personal compositions and reggae and funk influences. The leitmotif of the band is "to learn from one another and to share with all.”
