The band is drawn to the positive energy, the message and the sense of community that is inherent in New Orleans brass band music. Wedlake says, “We like the aspect of the street party and the spontaneity of being able to pop up anywhere. We do a lot of busking around the city and we do some cool gigs like playing during the halftime show at the ‘Bomber games. We also play the concourse an hour before the games to try and get some of that street energy going!”
Wedlake observes, “It’s been eye-opening for us to see this music reach such a wide audience. We’ve got fans that are six years old and fans that are 90 years old.”
Keeping the band's music accessible to a wide audience while still maintaining quality was important for the band from the start. Wedlake explains, “It kind of made sense because we’re all horn players and a lot of us have a history in jazz and improvised music so we mixed those elements in while playing a more relatable form of music than just performing for a jazz audience.”
The band takes different approaches to the music that they make based on the setting they’re in. Wedlake points out, “We do enjoy writing and arranging and a lot of our focus recently has been on putting together an EP of covers called Big Shiny Brass that we’ve arranged with all of our own influences coming out on July 27, 2016. Sometimes we’ll get hired for corporate functions that have a ‘20’s theme or a New Orleans theme and we’ll stick to more of the traditional stuff there.”
He continues, “We play a pretty good mix of traditional parade standards and our own originals that stem from that lineage as well as covers of ours that are in the brass band tradition. We tend to rework pop tunes pretty hard and bring our own influences into them too.”
Initially the band tried writing music with the full band but Wedlake says they’ve changed their approach over time. He says, “The way that we’ve found to be most successful has been working in smaller groups and having writing sessions with two, three or maybe four guys and hashing out ideas. We really stay focused and try to work through everything. We present it to the larger group when we have good skeleton work and some good material.”
He adds, “Whenever the music comes into the band we’re always free to go where the band wants to take it so it’s a collective process that way.”
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