Banksy in NOLA

Graffiti artist Banksy has been putting up stuff around NOLA, e.g.:

Marching band in inconvenient gas masks. See more here.

Olympic drumming, new Honk! posters, life in Northampton...

After hearing so much about it, my TV-less self has spent the morning searching for a full video of the Olympics opening ceremony, with its 2,008-member (the ceremony was heavy on numerology) drum battery.
I found a video here:


Olympics 2008 Opening Ceremony - video powered by Metacafe
It's the apotheosis of the marching band halftime show! Instead of making the links to Leni Rienfenstahl's "Olympia," or asking Anthony Lane's hypothetical question, "what kind of society is it that can afford to make patterns out of its people?" (well, A.L., let's remember those selfsame halftime shows—while this ceremony explodes the scale of any American halftime spectacle, we at Mystery Parade often ask similar questions about our own regimented ceremonies), or (on the logistical side) ask how such a large group of drummers was conducted (earpieces? a conductor in the crowd? disciplined intuition?) I just want to comment on the type of drum that those 2008 drummers were playing. According to this blog, the instruments, called fou drums, were not originally drums at all but vessels for wine. Well! How and why were these vessels transformed into drums? Our blogger solves the puzzle: "Very simple. When you are drinking high and you want to sing, what will you do? Grab anything you can reach and make beat." Right on! But could the drinking party that this blogger invokes be any further from the spirit of that tightly controlled Olympics opening ceremony, as impressive as it was?

So, more in the spirit of the original kind of fou drumming (in the sense of collective music-making fueled by spontaneous joy and, often, wine), I here report that Titubanda - Rome's 30+ renegade banda di strada - will be attending this year's Honk! Fest in October in Somerville, MA. Titubanda hosted the first brass band fest I ever attended, the 2004 Sbandata Romana, where my band was kept constantly surrounded by other bands, and constantly supplied with local red and white wine siphoned from huge glass wine casks (like these). Titubanda probably won't be able to fit such casks in their carry-ons, but I'm sure they will bring with them all that old-fou-spirit, and lots of horns and drums. Stay tuned to their website for their show dates after Honk! in Providence and New York...

And speaking of Honk!, I just saw some wonderful new Honk! posters online, designed by the Groundswell Collective:

Of course, here in the streets of America the wine does not flow so freely as it does in Rome. And in Northampton, MA, where I've just relocated, the beats don't flow so freely in the streets. Somehow I've managed to move to a city that, while seemingly so similar in spirit to Somerville, the home of Honk!, is cracking down on street music instead of celebrating it. According to what Dave DelloRusso of the local street-music-hero band, the Primate Fiasco, has told me, you must have a $20 permit to play on the sidewalks of downtown Northampton, and if you're a drummer or a member of a group numbering more than three, you're out of luck, permit or no.

Well, clearly I have grown spoiled by that small collection of legal rights enjoyed by musicians in New York. It's too early in my residence here to make any declarations of what should be done about the crackdown, (for that, check out Dave's take on the situation here, and read Tommy Devine's blog about the linked crackdown on panhandlers here [As Devine quips, "some people want a bohemian atmosphere without having to put up with any bohemians. "]), but expect more from me in the months to come...

Hornucopia!

Wow, so Mr. Dave Richoux just posted an alert to the Streetband list (see sidebar) about the HORNUCOPIA festival - a festival of horns and brass - happening in in Bay Area this September. The lineup looks divine -- Frank London's SF Klezmer Brass All-Stars (call me provincial, but I didn't know about his second group of all-stars out west!), Brass Menazeri, Extra Action Marching Band, Brass Liberation Orchestra, Polkacide, the Yard Dogs, and some other groups, for example: Lord Loves a Working Man (hope it's a Steve Martin reference), the Shotgun Wedding Quintet, and the Brass Mafia. More than 35 bands are in the lineup! You west coasters should check it out - and get excited about the marvelous proliferation of the not-so-clandestine street band underground... AND REPORT BACK!

http://www.hornucopiafestival.org

The New Orleans Diaspora and the People Who Love Them

This project is new to me, but it looks great. In their own words:

During the Finding Our Folk tour, high school and college students supported by community elders and grassroots organizations toured America and visited cities where Hurricane Katrina survivors were displaced. The tour partnered with local and national community based organizations and learning institutions, to identify evacuees and the cities where they were, to develop curriculum and provide training for high school and college students to facilitate workshops and support the overall documentation of the tour.

In each city, we convened survivors and local community residents to share their stories, and to participate in the different tour activities. In selected cities, the day of learning and healing culminated in a large-scale celebration of the people and culture of the Gulf Coast region. These events allowed evacuees to share their journey through art and culture and featured performances by national and local performers, musicians, poets and visual artists, intertwined with speeches by veterans of the civil rights and current resistance movements.

They've got the Hot 8 on board, and have been organizing second lines in cities around the US. They've also got a bunch of documentation up on their website.

The tour will be in the NYC area over the next couple of weeks before heading to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. They appear to have an email list and could probably use some support.

What Becomes a Big Weirdo Brass Band Most?

Ah, West Philly. It's kind of mythical. Back in my days as a capitalism-hatin', pepper spray-dodgin', train-hoppin', would-be abandoned building-squattin' young(ish) punk-ass good-for-nothing misanthrope* it seemed like that neighborhood was always on someone's lips with a kind of reverence now reserved for -- well, no place (maybe Berlin, but omigod Berlin is so last June). It was an overlooked Shangri-la that became sort of conspicuous by dint of its overlooked-ness. I never did move there, like a lot of people said they were going to, but maybe I should've.

The blog Stranded in Stereo has an interview with Gregg Mervine of the West Philadelphia Orchestra up. WPO has been together for something like two years, but seem to have turned up in an inordinate number of out-of-town places in that time (no link for that tidbit -- it's just an impression, not a fact). It's interesting to read the interview and go through a mental checklist of what's the same and what's different from other bands I know. I.e., flexible lineup [check!]; musical backgrounds tending toward Eastern Europe, jazz, and punk [check!]; brass and strings in happy-go-lucky collaboration [huh?]. Yeah. Emperor Norton's and Mucca Pazza manage that balancing act, and more power to 'em, I say. It's not so much a difficult thing to do as a difficult thing to do well.

Anyways, this interview is a good introduction to what WPO does. Which is nice, 'cause I hardly know what they do, having only seen them do one rocking set late on the second night of last year's Golden Festival. Hopefully there'll be more of that down the road.

By the way, WPO has a CD out, which I haven't heard yet so I can't say anything about it, but if you have, don't be shy about using the comments section, eh sparky?


* Whence I evolved into a capitalism-hatin', rent-sweatin', BA-havin', hygiene-neglectin', freelance hermit-livin' fancy pants know-it-all misanthrope.

Follitarians United Will Never Be Defeated

Here's some old footage from last Folly Day that I was just reminded of recently. It prominently features the Top Secret Attack Band, which you can't actually see because it doesn't actually exist. Please destroy your computer immediately after viewing and report for reeducation at your earliest convenience.

Attack of the Top Secret Attack Band!