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.”
Funkin’ It Up
You might also like
Jeff Lichtman Appointed Dean of Science
Neuroscientist to lead Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences division
New Kennedy School Dean Announced
Stanford political scientist Jeremy Weinstein set to lead
A New Chapter for Harvard Arts
The Office for the Arts turns 50, and its longtime director steps down.
Most popular
More to explore
How is Artificial Intelligence Being Taught at Harvard?
A new Harvard course on artificial intelligence teaches students how to use the tool responsibly.
Civil War American Writer and Abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier
Homes of the poet and abolitionist, whose verses were said to have inspired Abraham Lincoln.