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An Ashgate Book
 Brass Bands of the World:
Militarism, Colonial Legacies,
and Local Music Making
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Brass Bands of the World:
Militarism, Colonial Legacies,
and Local Music Making

Edited by

Suzel Ana Reily

Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

Katherine Brucher
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, USA
ROUTLEDGE

Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Suzel Ana Reily, Katherine Brucher and the contributors 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Brass bands of the world : militarism, colonial legacies, and local music making. – (SOAS
musicology series)
1. Brass bands. 2. Brass bands – History.
I. Series II. Reily, Suzel Ana, 1955– III. Brucher, Katherine.
784.9–dc23

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Brass bands of the world : militarism, colonial legacies, and local music making / edited
by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher.
pages cm.—(SOAS musicology series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4422-0 (hardcover)
1. Brass bands—History. 2. Band music—Social
aspects. I. Reily, Suzel Ana, 1955- II. Brucher, Katherine.

ML1300.B73 2013
784.909—dc23
2013000818

ISBN 9781409444220 (hbk)

Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita.

 Contents

List of Figures and Tables   vii

List of Musical Examples   ix
Notes on Contributors   xi
Foreword by Charles Keil   xiii
Acknowledgements   xxi

Introduction: The World of Brass Bands   1

Katherine Brucher and Suzel Ana Reily

1 Brass and Military Bands in Britain – Performance Domains, the

Factors that Construct them and their Influence   33
Trevor Herbert

2 Western Challenge, Japanese Musical Response: Military Bands in

Modern Japan   55
Sarah McClimon

3 Battlefields and the Field of Music: South Korean Military Band

Musicians and the Korean War   79
Heejin Kim

4 From Processions to Encontros: The Performance Niches of the

Community Bands of Minas Gerais, Brazil   99
Suzel Ana Reily

5 The Representational Power of the New Orleans Brass Band   123

Matt Sakakeeny

6 Soldiers of God: The Spectacular Musical Ministry of the

Christmas Bands in the Western Cape, South Africa   139
Sylvia Bruinders

7 Composing Identity and Transposing Values in Portuguese

Amateur Wind Bands   155
Katherine Brucher
vi Brass Bands of the World

8 Playing Away: Liminality, Flow and Communitas in an Ulster

Flute Band’s Visit to a Scottish Orange Parade   177
Gordon Ramsey

9 From Village to World Stage: The Malleability of Sinaloan Popular

Brass Bands   199
Helena Simonett

Bibliography   217
Discography   235
Index   237
 List of Figures and Tables

Figures

4.1 Banda de Música Giulietta Dionesi, 1900. Photos courtesy of

Márcia Lemes 111
4.2 Banda de Música Memória de Dom Pedro II, 1899. Photo courtesy
of the Centro de Memória do Sul de Minas 112
4.3 Campanhense Jazz-Band. Photo courtesy of the Centro de Memória
do Sul de Minas 114
4.4 Corporação Musical Dom Inocêncio playing at an encontro de
bandas in Varginha, Minas Gerais, 2008. Photo by Suzel Ana Reily 119
5.1 Members of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid & Pleasure Club
pose for a picture before their parade, 3 September 2006. Photo by
Matt Sakakeeny 124
5.2 Black Men of Labor founding members Gregg Stafford (far left)
and Fred Johnson (far right), 3 September 2006. Photo by Matt
Sakakeeny133
5.3 Members of the Black Men of Labor dance in front of the musicians
and second liners, 2 September 2007. Photo by Matt Sakakeeny 134
6.1 St. Joseph’s Christmas Band on parade in Woodstock, 2009. Photo
courtesy of Paul Grendon 146
6.2 St. Joseph’s Christmas Band performing at the Union Competition,
2010. Photo courtesy of Paul Grendon 149
7.1 The statue, Homage to the Musician, Largo do Santo António,
Covões, 2011. Photo by Katherine Brucher 156
7.2 One of the youngest (foreground) and the oldest (background)
musicians in the band in front of the church before the procession
for the Feast of Saint Anthony of Covões, June 2011. Photo by
Katherine Brucher 172
8.1 Intense focus on the music as the SGWM band enters the field, 2008 187
9.1 Banda Los Guamuchileños in 1947 with a wealthy businessman
from Culiacán, sitting. Photo courtesy of Teodoro Ramírez Pereda 202
9.2 Banda El Recodo in front of the church of the village of El Recodo,
1943. Photo courtesy of Rigoberto Zamudio Velarde 204
9.3 Banda El Recodo de Cruz Lizárraga, c. 1963. Photo courtesy of
Isidoro Ramírez Sánchez 205
viii Brass Bands of the World

Table

2.1 Yamada Kōsaku, ‘Shoshun no Zensō to Kōshinkyoku – Nihon

no Kodomo no Tame’ (Early Spring Prelude and March – for the
Children of Japan) 76
 List of Musical Examples

2.1 ‘A Band With Drawn Swords’. Used with permission of Zen-On

Gakufu61
2.2 ‘Gunkan Kōshinkyoku’ (Battleship March: opening of trio)
(reduced transcription). Used with permission of Zen-On Gakufu 64
2.3 ‘Lion Dance of Echigo’ by Yoshimoto Mitsuzō, clarinet excerpt.
Used with permission of the Osaka City Band, photo courtesy of
Kokusho Kanko Kai 66
2.4 ‘Aikoku Kōshinkyoku’ (Patriotic March) by Setoguchi Tōkichi
Used with permission of Zen-On Gakufu 73
2.5 ‘Early Spring Prelude and March’ as performed by the Tokyo
College of Music Symphonic Band 75
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Notes on Contributors

Katherine Brucher is an Assistant Professor of Music at DePaul University,

Chicago, Illinois. She received her PhD in Musicology from the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published on the music of Portugal and the
Portuguese diaspora, music and migration, global wind band traditions and ethnic
music traditions in Chicago. She is currently working on an ethnography about
community wind bands in rural Portugal and their role in establishing musical and
cultural ties to Portuguese diaspora communities.

Sylvia Bruinders is a Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the South African

College of Music at the University of Cape Town, where she teaches African
and African diasporic musics. She completed her doctorate at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2011. Her primary research interest is to investigate
processes of cultural transmission within certain marginalized communities in
the Western Cape of South Africa. Through her research on Christmas bands she
investigated the subjectivities of members of the bands and explored how social
and political processes impact community practices in the Western Cape.

Trevor Herbert is Professor of Music at the Open University. He has worked

extensively on cultural and musical aspects related to brass instruments. He is
a contributor to New Grove, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and
the World Encyclopaedia of Popular Music. His publications are extensive
and prolific and include The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History
(Oxford University Press, 2000), The Trombone (Yale University Press, 2006)
and (with Helen Barlow) Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth
Century (Oxford University Press, 2013). He holds honorary fellowships from
Leeds College of Music and the Royal College of Music, has an honorary chair in
music at Cardiff University and was awarded the Christopher Monk Award of the
Historic Brass Society in 2002.

Charles Keil was born in Norwalk, CT (1939) and raised in Darien, and always
wanted to find out where the grooviest music was coming from and why. His MA
thesis at the University of Chicago, Urban Blues (1966/1992), is still in print.
Tiv Song (1979) describes interrelationships among ‘the arts’ in an egalitarian
society. Other book collaborations include Polka Happiness (1992), My Music
(1993), Music Grooves (1994), Bright Balkan Morning (2002), Born to Groove
(2005, on the web) and Polka Theory (forthcoming).
xii Brass Bands of the World

Heejin Kim is a Research Professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South

Korea. She completed her doctorate in Musicology at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the study of transnational
musical processes. Her doctoral research investigated these processes in relation
to US and South Korean military music.

Sarah McClimon earned an MA and a PhD in music at the University of

Hawai‘i, Mānoa. She studied Japanese koto performance and musicology
at Tokyo University of the Arts with the support of the Japan Foundation and
the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
(Monbukagakusho). Her research interests focus on music, emotion and politics
in the traditional and modern music of Japan. She currently resides in Northern
California, where she teaches music education at Humboldt State University and
music at Fortuna High School.

Gordon Ramsey was awarded his PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast in 2009 for
his work on loyalist bands in Northern Ireland. His monograph Music, Emotion
and Identity in Ulster Marching Bands: Flutes, Drums and Loyal Sons (Peter
Lang 2011) is based on his doctoral research. Forthcoming publications include
contributions to The Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland, and papers focusing on
the anthropology of music and on the anthropology of tourism. He is currently
teaching anthropology and ethnomusicology at Queen’s University.

Suzel Ana Reily is a Reader in Ethnomusicology and Social Anthropology

at Queen’s University Belfast. Her publications include Voices of the Magi:
Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil (University of Chicago Press, 2002),
the editorship of Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities (2000, British Journal
of Ethnomusicology 9.1) and The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking’s
Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century (Ashgate, 2006), and the production
of a website/CD-Rom based on John Blacking’s ethnography of the Venda girls’
initiation school.

Matt Sakakeeny is an Assistant Professor of Music at Tulane University. His

publications include Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Duke
University Press, 2013) and articles in Ethnomusicology, Black Music Research
Journal, Current Musicology and other journals.

Helena Simonett is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and Associate

Director of the Centre for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She holds
an MA in Musicology from the University of Zurich and a PhD in Ethnomusicology
from UCLA. Her main publications include Banda: Mexican Musical Life across
Borders (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), En Sinaloa nací: historia de la música de
banda (Sociedad Histórica de Mazatlán, 2004) and The Accordion in the Americas:
Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More! (University of Illinois Press, 2012).
 Foreword
Charles Keil

May there be many volumes of post-militarist, post-colonial analyses asking the

question: how can brass bands best define and serve their local communities? I
remember Max Ciesielski1 telling me that the Polish-American tailors of Buffalo,
NY, though working in a variety of different shops, had a brass band representing,
defining and serving Polish immigrants in the wider community. This was just a
hundred years ago and there were dozens of brass bands in Buffalo criss-crossing
many community lines defined by guild, union, ethnicity, neighbourhood and
class. So, see me in your mind’s eye bowing, hands together in prayer, saying
‘Arigato’ in many different languages to everyone connected with this brass band
work in the century of ‘Great Transition’2 to local food, local energy, local music-
dance-celebrations and a rebuilding of local communities.

Yes to the Dionysian blown and beaten! Outdoors. In public. In Nature. Wild.
Happy to be ignoring the Apollonian strung and sung. Indoors. Domesticated.

The blown and beaten are (in my mind anyway) prime, primitive, primary
communication.3 Drumming we have been doing since before we separated

1
See Charles Keil and Angeliki V. Keil, Polka Happiness (Philadelphia, 1992),
pp. 32–5.
2
See the new economics foundation (nef) in the UK and the New Economics Institute
in the USA.
3
Ever since attending a Ray Birdwhistle lecture in the early 1960s, I’ve been
enthusiastic about kinesics, paralanguage, proxemics, synchronics, ‘participatory
discrepancies’ – the (culturally relative) 80 to 93 per cent of human communication that is
flowing in over a dozen overlapping non-verbal channels. More recently (this century) I’ve
realized that most of the verbal 7 to 20 per cent of ‘secondary communication’ in our culture
is worse than nonsense: lies, spin, ‘infotainment’, advertising, ideology, propaganda, small
talk, trivia, TMI (Too Much Information) most of the time. Certainly most of the ‘tertiary’,
‘virtual verbal’ or perhaps ‘terminal communications’ of the media where 8–18-year-old
addicts now spend over 11 hours a day on average (Tamar Lewin, ‘If Your Kids Are Awake,
They’re Probably Online’, New York Times, 20 January 2010), is part of a techno-cocooning
process that Andrew Kimbrell describes accurately in his ‘Cold Evil: Technology and Modern
Ethics’, Twentieth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures (Salisbury, CT, 28 October 2000),
available at http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html [Accessed
5 September 2011].
xiv Brass Bands of the World

from the chimps, bonobos and chest-whomping gorillas. To their eternal credit,
drummers have never been accepted and co-opted as musicians, not really.4 Flutes
have been with us for a long, long time, and double reeds and reeds are the most
powerful of voice disguisers – all the blown instruments are way more thrilling
than strings. The blown sound comes from the interior of the human body, breath,
and through the mouth, teeth, lips. Strings are manipulated by finger tips, requiring
delicate hollow bodies to resonate. Bagpipes at funerals, not string quartets, bring
tears to the eyes of mourners. All this opening praise of the primitive, just to be
clear about my bias for prime brass bands, drum and bugle corps, fife and drum,
bagpipers, Tibetan monastery ‘traffic jams’ and two-trumpet polka bands. And
then there’s my corresponding but non-dialectical deep prejudice against guitars,
singer/songwriters at the piano, lounge music, all that ‘classical’ and ‘acoustic’
hokey-folkie, plus that over-amplified rock ’n’ roll stuff. Haven’t we had enough
of manipulative fingers, stringiness and amplification?
Personal preferences aside, it was Nietzsche’s very dialectical use of the
Apollonian/Dionysian forces that inspired some of my best scholarship,5 as well as
an impassioned call for a resurgence of brass bands in the over-developed world.6
These powers of creativity – embodied energy/feeling vs. perfected dream/form
– once worked themselves out in Greek ‘goat-song’ or tragedy, and will hopefully
play out as comedy in every thriving local commons this century.
A hundred years ago, in the era before the First World War, and back into the
late nineteenth century when ‘Booth led boldly with his big bass drum’, many
people were part-time musicians and many musicians ‘doubled twice’:7 cornet and
violin, trombone and cello, tuba and string bass, in addition to holding another job
or ‘day gig’. A piano in every parlour; an accordion in every bar; big banjo and
mandolin clubs everywhere. And a brass band for every public rite of passage! I
imagine the nineteenth century to be an era of both conviviality and virtuosity,
of intimacy and vibrancy, when small bands and orchestras were at their peak
within Western ‘civilization and progress’,8 just before the mass media took over
and straitjacketed so much of our consciousness. I believe that I wouldn’t have

4
See Rob Boonzajer Flaes, Brass Unbound: Secret Children of the Colonial Brass
Band (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 47–51, for a great example of drummers not accepted as
musicians in Ghana.
5
Charles Keil, ‘Peoples’ Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and
Hegemony’, Dialectical Anthropology, 10 (1985): 119–30.
6
Charles Keil, ‘Applied Ethnomusicology and a Rebirth of Music from the Spirit of
Tragedy’, Ethnomusicology, 26/3 (1982): 7–11.
7
Charles Keil, ‘When Everyone Doubled Twice’, Allegro, 107/6 (June 2007),
available at http://www.local802afm.org/publication_entry.cfm?xEntry=81364664
[Accessed 27 January 2012].
8
See Stanley Diamond’s In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, NJ, 1974), p. 1,
where the first sentences read, ‘Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at
home. Each is an aspect of the other’.
 Foreword xv

developed as a human being or have had a 30-year career as staff ethnomusicologist

in the American Studies Department of SUNY Buffalo (now called the University
at Buffalo, State University of New York) if it weren’t for the rich cultural residues
of these earlier social formations9 that my mother and Gus Helmecke first passed
on to me.
My mom played some piano daily most of the 92 years of her life (and drum
set in a band at Wheelock College), usually stride piano versions of old Fats Waller
and Ellington favourites. My bedroom in the very small house in a working-class
neighbourhood where I lived my first eight years also housed the upright piano.
I have a photo of me in diapers banging on pots and pans in the backyard, and I
remember boring piano lessons from a bony-fingered old lady who tugged on her
‘cough syrup’ as I tried to do scales and exercises. My mother got the message
early that I wanted to drum and one game we played a lot was ‘tapping songs’,
using fingers to beat out the rhythms of a melody on each other’s arms – can you
name the song just from hearing and feeling the rhythm of it? She also found an
old red barrel drum at an auction, presumed to be Chinese, thick skin heads tacked
down in a mysterious way that has enabled the drum to remain playable for over
65 years! I beat on it when I was 5 or 6 and I still use it during ‘sounding sangas’
today; it has a low mellow tone played from either side.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my first official drum lessons were given to me
by the person then generally acknowledged to be the best bass drum and cymbals
player in the world. August Helmecke had served many years as the highest paid
member and crucial heartbeat of the John Philip Sousa Band. He was in the midst
of a seven-year stint with the Goldman Band when I was born in 1939. My mother
took me to the Saturday lessons programme at Darien High School when I was
7 or 8 and Gus Helmecke must have been in his eighties. We met in the physics
lab for group lessons and it was very physical! We held heavy sticks as high as we
could reach above our heads (I got the same instruction a few weeks ago taking
my first formal taiko lesson in Japan) and when Gus said ‘Shtroke!’, we ‘shtruck’
the stick against the black physics lab tables. We were to stroke with the opposite
hand as the hand that had just struck had to be pushed up to the ceiling again.
Whole arm, whole body involvement, as in taiko drumming. And then whole and
half strokes with each hand to execute the ‘Mama Daddy’ accelerating symmetry
of the long or double-stroke roll. Somewhere in the midst of the basic rudiments,
I was passed along to Russell Spang, retired orchestra pit drummer from New
Haven, who knew the whole range of percussion from sticks to brushes to mallets
on xylophones and marimba. Finally I practised most seriously on the rubber pad
for Tony Chirco and his ‘Adler system’. It was he who informed me that while
the Basie charts were written in 4/4, they were performed in the ‘triplet feeling’ of
12/8. I have been on the ‘12/8 Path’ ever since, and putting my drumming skills

9
‘The residual is the emergent’ is a slogan formulated from reading Raymond
Williams. See Charles and Angeliki V. Keil, ‘In Pursuit of Polka Happiness … and a
Classless Culture’, Musical Traditions, 2 (1984): 6–11.
xvi Brass Bands of the World

into one instrument after another – drum set, string bass, euphonium, electric bass,
cornet, valve trombone and currently sousaphone. I play drums on all of them.
Here’s Papa Jo Jones describing a similar experience:

There, he was transfixed when he heard the sound of the drum played by
August Helmecke, who played with John Philip Sousa. ‘The bass drum hit my
stomach and I never relinquished that feeling’, Jones recalled. ‘That was my
indoctrination to music’. Aunt Mattie then bought the rhythm-addled boy a snare
drum, which he taught himself to play for tips of ice cream and candy around
the neighbourhood.

When Jo was 10, his father was killed in an accident on a barge near Tuscaloosa.
Unable to support the family, Elizabeth Jones enrolled her son at an orphanage
school, where he got his first musical training. He later attended Lincoln Junior
High in Birmingham and an agricultural school near Huntsville, where he learned to
play the trumpet, saxophone and piano. ‘I didn’t think I would end up a drummer’,
Jones later told bassist Milt Hinton. ‘I was trying out all these instruments, but
somehow I played drums on all of them’.10
It’s true that Jo Jones never relinquished that feeling, and wanted to share it
with everyone throughout his life. Al McKibbon, the bassist who personified the
mid-century fusion of jazz and ‘latin’, described hearing Jones playing with Basie
and realized that the outer head of his bass drum was a tympani head tuned so that
his ‘bombs’ or heaviest beats would resonate most powerfully into the stomachs
of others. (McKibbon also described the pleasure of playing with Jones, and just a
few other drummers, who knew how to pedal a bass drum lightly on all four beats
of the measure while blending with an unamplified string bass.) So it is ‘touch’ on a
bass drum that is the foundation of many great grooves in all kinds of brass bands.
I was in my late forties when a pot-peddling poet from Texas called me up for
breakfast at our favourite place on Main Street in Buffalo. Over coffee he described
some of his famous regular customers in New York, and how full of great stories
they were, Papa Jo Jones, by then the most senior jazz drummer in the city, among
them. Did I know that Papa Jo used to take Sid Catlett and Chick Webb and all the
famous jazz drummers to concerts by the Sousa Band? No, I didn’t. And smoke a
little weed first, so they could really dig the bass drummer? ‘You’re kidding, that
was my first teacher!’ I was so surprised by this information because I had always
thought of my first teacher as stiff, Germanic, rudimentary, old fashioned, the last

10
Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians, s.v. ‘Jo Jones (Jonathan Samuel David)’, Tim
Wilkins available at http://www.jazz.com/encyclopedia/jones-jo-jonathan-david-samuel
[Accessed 22 August 2011]. Jo Jones often gets credit for raising the low hat to a hi-hat,
riding the cymbal with a ‘ting-ti-ting’ beat and arranging a drum set to ‘swing’ the swing
era. I love it that we both got our ‘first lesson’ from Gus and that I learned that fact today,
8 August 2011. The first time I saw Jo Jones play was on TV trading fours with Chatur Lal
of India, an early tabla hero in the West. I could relate.
 Foreword xvii

person in the world who hip black drummers would go to hear. I went home and
got on the phone to retired Luther Thompson in his eighties, once the indefatigable
music director of Darien’s bands, choirs and Saturday lesson programmes:

‘Why would great jazz drummers go to hear Gus Helmecke?’

‘Oh, that’s easy’, said Mr Thompson, ‘he had great schtick!’
‘You mean a great stick? Like a great beat?’, said I.
‘Well, he had that too. But he had schtick. Tricks. He was a showman!’

Mr Thompson went on to describe how Helmecke had a whole arsenal of tricks

and gimmicks, tossing the bass drum beater in the air and catching it in time for a
key accent, hitting the bass drum (and shoving it with his knee at the same time)
so that the power-stroke appeared to knock the big drum off the stand it was on – it
had to be caught with both hands before it rolled off into the trumpet section. And
so on. Gus was in vaudeville before he joined Sousa, and he was probably one of
the major reasons why Sousa’s concert tours consistently drew the biggest crowds
in music history prior to the Beatles.
I never had a bass drum lesson proper from the world’s greatest. But I got it
second-hand from Fred Fennell who had watched Helmecke with Sousa and who
knew from much experience that every band conductor was only as good as his
bass drummer.11 When I was a sophomore in high school and went to Hartford
to play bass drum for the All-State Concert Band, Fennell was the conductor. A
few measures into the first march of the first rehearsal, he waved this huge band
to a halt, jumped off the podium and made his way to the percussion section for a
detailed workshop with the bass drummer, me. First we spent quite a bit of time
tuning the bass drum, which, like almost every free-standing or non-jazz-set bass
drum I have encountered since, was way too high in pitch. Getting the batter head
as low as possible, loosening every ‘lug’, untuning in order to tune, pushing at
it to stretch the skin (ah, the pre-plastic era) a bit, was Fred’s goal. I remember
he wanted me to see the head vibrating. That loose! The question seemed to
be: how low can this particular drum and drumhead go and still be responsive?
With that question mostly answered we turned our attention to the resonating
head on the other side, and I don’t remember Fred giving me a rule or a formula.
The tightness or pitch had to be different for the batter head to resonate properly,
and that probably meant ‘higher’ since the batter head was ‘as low as it could
go’. (Certainly all the Balkan/Ottoman daoulis I have heard or dealt with have a

11
‘With the help of Hospice, he arrived home in time to see the brilliant orange
and pinks in the western skies last evening. A bit before Midnight, dad told me he was
“frustrated and disappointed”. When I asked him, “Why?” he replied, “There’s no drummer
here yet. I can’t die without a drummer!” I told him that I loved him, and that “Heaven’s
best drummer was on the way.” Moments later he said, “I hear him! I hear him! I’m OK
now.” This was my final conversation with my dad’. Cathy Fennell Martensen’s email to
friends of Fred Fennell (7 December 2004).
xviii Brass Bands of the World

high-pitched head for the flicking stick and a lower pitched head for the thumper.)
As always, it comes down to ‘personal preferences’ and a ‘communal conserving
consensus’ for the desired sound. I can’t remember exactly what Fred Fennell
said to me over a half century ago, but I know that after the drum was tuned to his
satisfaction and my amazement, he gave me one quick and powerful pep talk, to
the effect that his baton and my bass drum beater needed to be in the best possible
synchrony at all times. I had to push, anticipate his beat, hit just before ‘the pulse’
for the sound to reach the other players in time. I quickly understood that my
reputation as a jazz drummer in Darien had gotten me this All-State gig, and I had
better live up to great expectations. That public bass drum lesson, a hundred teen
peers waiting for me to become competent, implanted in me a respect for what
William Blake called ‘the minute particulars’ and what I was later to call ‘the
participatory discrepancies’ that involve people in music.12
In subsequent high school years I moved up to tympani in the orchestra and
on to an All-Eastern ensemble in Atlantic City. I had drummed for the Norwalk
Symphony from age 12, and in college percussed professionally with the New
Haven Symphony where pianist Arthur Rubenstein once accompanied me in
the famous Liszt ‘Triangle Concerto’. Whatever the instrument I was playing
in the percussion section, it became obvious to me very early in life, and at all
points along the way, that composers, conductors and performers in the world of
departmentalized legitimate music, school music, serious music, written music
wanted ‘the drummer’ for subtle support and/or for decoration, adornment, a little
‘colour’ here and there. I rebelled.
It was in reaction to this situation that I became quite fanatic about, first, jazz
drumming and ‘drumming’ the other instruments as needed in service to dancers,
and then theorizing groovology, the wording of grooves, as both my religious
12/8 Path in life and as one ‘Joyous Science’ among many in service to what
has most recently been called ‘The Great Transition’.13 Since the early 1980s my
mind has been shifting from analysis to synthesis, from secondary and tertiary
communication to primary communication,14 from business-as-usual to a search
for the primitive and diversified libertarian socialism of intensely local classless
societies,15 from his-story to Her Story, from strung/sung to blown/beaten … and
that’s where we began this Foreword.
To end it I will consider ensembles broadly, and brass bands in particular, as
gateways to moral and political awakening and how I came to see brass bands
leading the parade into the sustainable, eco-niched, autonomous communities of

12
Before 1898, Tolstoy and Bryulov called the participatory discrepancies ‘wee bits’
and found them in all the arts, but especially in music. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art, trans. Aylmer
Maude (Oxford, 1962), pp. 199–202, emphasized in Maude’s ‘Introduction’, pp. viii–xii.
13
See footnote 2 above.
14
See footnote 3 above.
15
See ‘Truth and Traditions’ at TruthAndTraditionsParty.org [Accessed 15 September
2011].
 Foreword xix

the classless future. It feels to me that from infancy to old age I have always
wanted to be a player among players in a variety of ensembles. I can’t list them all,
a few real, many imagined over 70 years, but the OCO (Outer Circle Orchestra)
and 12/8 Path Band persist in Buffalo, NY, the first for over forty years and the
second for over twenty. I think they persist despite an ever-shrinking demand for
live musicking that serves dancers because wild ideas (now considered somewhat
utopian) about free and equal creativity, full expression, funkiness and soulfulness,
pursuit of happiness – Dionysian trance-dancing? – can’t be realized or actualized
in daily life by marketed products. On the contrary, it seems to require some search
for communitas16 to motivate participants to continue playing in such ensembles.
Experiencing the joys of ensemble playing as young children seems to be the best
way of ensuring that every community will be able to form such ensembles in
the future. For myself, these modes of participating have been the sine qua non,
‘without which nothing’, in relation to ethnomusicological research and writing.
If I’m not experiencing the joys of participatory consciousness in some mode of
grooving, why on earth turn trees into paper and write about it? If children are not
brought into the primary communication pleasures of group drumming, choral
dancing, call-and-response singing very early in life, why would they be interested
in brass banding or any kind of creative production when they can just push a
button and consume it passively?
I became an ethnomusicologist, if truth be told, not because I wanted to groove
throughout my life (though I did), but because I wanted to answer questions about
the essential dynamism of African American musicking and ‘make a decent living’
doing it. Degrees and publications in anthropology (Urban Blues MA and Tiv Song
PhD) made tenured teaching possible and let me help Angeliki V. Keil raise a
family. Dropping out and going to New York to become a jazz musician would have
disappointed my parents, made a future family life difficult, put a question mark
after ‘making a living’, and so, when sorely tempted as a frustrated sophomore in
college, I didn’t. And again, after being bounced out of the University of Chicago’s
Anthropology Department and piling up ‘incompletes’ at Indiana, I couldn’t find a
way to go to Africa as a volunteer. So I stayed in school.
I can’t pinpoint the time between ages 15 and 30-something when a teenage
conscientious objection to war, not wanting to kill or be killed on command, ripened
into full blown anarcho-pacifism, but I do know that the ‘libertarian socialism’
of jazz, full individual expression supported by total small group collaboration,
became my model or paradigm somewhere in the middle of my college years
(1959–60). A long-playing recording called Jazz Begins made it vividly clear to
me that New Orleans brass bands dirging death and affirming life were at the root
of this paradigm, indeed, had invented it. Playing in college Dixieland bands with
Basie and Ellington sidemen like Buddy Tate, Buck Clayton, Rex Stewart; playing
Yale reunion gigs with Ahmed Abdul Malik on bass or Herbie Nichols on piano

16
See Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and
Ways of Life (Chicago, 1947).
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