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hypnotic brass ensemble - hypnotic brass ensemble - honest jons records - cd

Genre: Jazz

1. Alyo
2. Gibbous
3. War
4. Ballicki Bone
5. Flipside
6. Marcus Garvey
7. Jupiter
8. Party Started
9. Rabbit Hop
10. Sankofa
11. Hypnotic
12. Satin Sheets
13. Rabbit Hop (Version)

HBE are eight brothers from the south side of Chicago. They come from an extraordinary musical family. Other sisters and brothers are professional musicians, their mothers are singers, and Philip Cohran, their father, has roots running back to Mississippi, his time in the musical hothouse of 1940s St Louis, and his seminal role with Sun Ra in Chicago in the 1950s. The HBE's were wakened at 6 a.m. every morning for several hours’ music practice before going to school and from an early age they were a central part of their father’s Youth Ensemble, while at night they used to sneak under the covers and listen to NWA and Public Enemy. By the end of the nineties, with everyone out of school, they brought together their musicianship, their jazz roots and their hip hop sensibility, and made a living busking on the streets of Chicago. Crucial to the mix was their burgeoning skills as composers, which meant the music they played really was their own. (They wrote all of the tracks on this album except Alyo, written by their father, and Rabbit Hop, written by Moondog.) Eventually the group transferred to New York City, and after playing out relentlessly, including gigs with Mos Def and Erykah Badu, and some particularly incendiary shows in Europe, they have come to be known as one of the hottest and most individual bands around. So here it is, the gorgeous, thrilling music of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble !

Gabriel Hubert (Hudah) - trumpet
Saiph Graves (Cid) - trombone
Tycho Cohran (LT) - sousaphone
Amal Hubert (Baji) - trumpet
Jafar Graves (Yosh) - trumpet
Seba Graves (Clef) - trombone
Tarik Graves (Smoov) - trumpet
Uttama Hubert (Rocco) - euphonium


with
Sola Akingbola – drums (3 / 4 / 5 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 13)

Malcolm Catto – drums (1 / 2 / 11 / 12)
Tony Allen – drums (6)
Flea – bass (4)
Damon Albarn – moog (13)

On the tracks, in the words of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble:


Alyo — Alyo Tolbert was the star dancer for the Montu Dance Company in Chicago. They were part of the music scene we grew up with. Our father wrote this song for Alyo after he died. When he danced he was electrifying. People would call out his name to drive him on higher — “Alyo! Alyo!”.


Gibbous — There’s waxing Gibbous and waning Gibbous – it’s the phase of the moon just before and just after it's full. We wrote this song in the street. We’d been out in the Loop all day. It was cold and we weren’t making any money. We thought, Fuck it, let’s create some music. LT laid down the bassline and the song came in about 10 minutes. And then a beautiful woman walked by and we had the name. Gibbous.


War — Clef brought this in and Yosh went away and worked on it and he got it wrong , he changed the count and he changed the notes. But that’s how the song was created, because we stuck with the way Yosh did it. It’s based in a subliminal way on pop's song African Skies. You find a lot of our early material was ballads. As the band has got older, and played more gigs, playing for people who want to dance, we’ve got more uptempo. A fighting song? Not really – it’s one to make you get up and move.


Ballicki Bone — We used to sing Ballicki Bone when we were kids. Next door to our house there was a huge overgrown vacant yard. We’d pretend it was our jungle. We’d have our arrows and spears and stuff and Ballicki Bone was our own private song we’d sing walking through the jungle, or when we were inside cleaning our rooms.


Flipside — I was writing this song for my daughter who had just been born, and like often happens the brothers took it and made something new. When we played it on the street at first we called it the new song. This was when we didn’t have a drummer and we didn’t have an album to sell. We just played for donations. Our friend Robert — his nickname was Freddie Flipside, he was like a brother of ours — started coming along with us, to be our announcer. He was so good at it. He’d say crazy stuff — “Crack costs money, this music's not free!” Everybody would be laughing, and money was going in the box. He was a vinyl collector, especially music from the seventies, he called it swing. And he loved this song — “It’s got that swing!”. One day after we were playing, he got shot dead, driving in a car with LT, Cid and Yosh. So now the song is called Flipside.


Marcus Garvey — I wrote it when I was riding home on my bicycle one night. I was shit-drunk and it was raining and I was scared I was going to fall off. I was thinking of the Copa Cubana — I wrote the whole thing in my head with that Cuban sound, riding home in the rain. (Clef)


Jupiter — The planet of expansion, so that’s what the song does, it expands. This was created the same day that Hypnotic was. Mama Aquilla wrote lyrics for it: “ I am the moon, the stars, the planets, dreams of eternity flying across the sky”.


Party Started — Written when LT was sick, Halloween 2003. He had to go to hospital. While he was sick we wanted to keep going so we had a deep rehearsal and came up with five songs. Smoov played sousaphone. Check how the drums go boom boom every measure. That beat’s called the Chicago Jook.


Rabbit Hop — Moondog played in the streets of New York fifty years before we did, so this makes sense. Damon’s idea for the Chop Up live shows we did last summer.


Sankofa — Done for Honest Jon’s when they were doing their Tony Allen remixes. We just got sent the drum line. We didn’t know what to do, we just knew we wanted to do a melody badder than Fela! Rocco came up with the first phrase and Cid added to it and it went around the room. Clef tried to take us up right to the top of the register, but we said no.


Hypnotic — One of our first songs, written for an open-mike session at the Club Alphonse on 13th and State Street, because we needed something fresh.


Satin Sheets — Satin Sheets is the first Hypnotic song, the very first one where all of us were involved.