TRENDS: Marching Bands

We called this ages ago when Outkast released “Morris Brown” as the first single from their movie soundtrack, “Idlewild.” The marching band’s romping swing sounded like cumulonimbus clouds, a bouncy, fluffy backdrop to Big Boi’s equally buoyant rhymes. “These guys are on to something,” we thought as we reminisced about our childhood days tagging along with our parents’ to the homecoming games at their historically black alma maters. Our friends and fellow musicphiles were skeptical, though. Then we discovered the band Hot 8, a New Orleans band which takes the Afro-centric drum patterns of Washington D.C.’s go-go music and marries it to boisterous brass instrumentals, while listening to British soul music authority Gilles Peterson on BBC Radio One. Several months later, during a stroll through Manhattan's Union Square, we noticed a massive crowd surrounding a group of kids blowing on tubas, trumpets, and trombones. Weeks later we heard their music again on, yup, BBC Radio One and found out that the guys are actually a band from Chicago with a strong cult following called the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. And, you know, three definitely makes a trend.

-Muse
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