Funkin’ It Up

Rebirth Brass Band

Rebirth Brass Band
July 26, The Middle East, Cambridge
August 14, The Sinclair, Cambridge
View the website

The Grammy Award-winning, New Orleans-based Rebirth Brass Band brings its unique blend of heavy funk with a hip-hop edge and horn-blasting street jazz to Cambridge this summer. The two shows offer Northeasterners the rare chance to really let go—sing, shout, and dance “second-line” parade-style—without traveling to the South’s musical wellspring. “Rebirth…is more like a party than a machine,” according to The New York Times. “It’s a working model of the New Orleans musical ethos: as long as everybody knows what they’re doing, anyone can cut loose.” Founded in 1983 by high-school friends in the city’s Tremé neighborhood—tuba and sousaphone player Philip Frazier, his brother, bass drummer Keith Frazier, and trumpeter Kermit Ruffins—the group played on the streets of the French Quarter, reviving that tradition, and soon recorded hits like “Do Watcha Wanna,” and later played another, “Feel Like Funkin’ It Up,” in the opening scene of Treme, the HBO series about post-Katrina spiritual recovery. The band now performs all over the world and will no doubt be trumpeting their newest release, Move Your Body, which features the infectious “Rebirth Groove.”

Click here for the July-August 2014 issue table of contents

You might also like

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes Announced

Winners across five categories, from commentary on Gaza to criticism on public architecture

Doctors for Change

Countway Library exhibit explores historic anti-nuclear activism

Rendering Dreams in Art

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum

Most popular

These Student Speakers Have History to Share

A second-generation speaker, a conservationist, and a student from afar will deliver Commencement speeches — with no notes

Harvard Commencement Day 2025

The 374th Commencement exercises 

Harvard Confers Six Honorary Degrees

Abdul-Jabbar, Moreno join scholars in climate, poverty, immigration

Explore More From Current Issue

Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams at the Peabody Essex Museum

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum

Biology's "Mirror Organisms"—And Their Dangers

Life forms built from left-handed DNA and RNA could threaten Earth’s plants, animals, and insects.

Harvard Percussionist and Composer Jessie Cox

An experimental percussionist-composer pushing the limits of music