Fire Hoses of Upper Harmonics: The Rebirth Brass Band Live

I’ve been trampled at fire code-flaunting hardcore shows, watched my pants flap to doom metal orchestras and danced for 20 hours straight to blistering techno, but I’ve never been rattled by a musical performance like the one I caught a few summers ago at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans. The Rebirth Brass Band, a Grammy-winning combo of horns and percussion, spends ample time on the road these days, but some number of its members can be found onstage at the Maple Leaf each Tuesday playing to a crowd of tourists, college kids, music buffs and the sort of grizzled locals you’d guess show up often.

I was staying in New Orleans with a friend who works in wealth management at a bank downtown, and I’d left my earplugs in my suitcase in his guestroom; when you’ve previously gone unprotected at a two-hour Sunn O))) concert, you don’t think you’ll need them for a jazz show suggested by a guy in a polo shirt.

We stood about halfway back in the smallish music room as the band took the stage, hoisting marching tubas and clipping saxophones to neck straps. In middle school band class, I’d spent countless fifth periods getting blasted by the trombone section behind me, but the presence of microphones raised to horn level on stage sounded no alarms. The few trumpet notes blown as a sound check were piercing but not truly disconcerting. The patrons, most on their third or fourth round by 10 or 10:30 PM – this was New Orleans – filed in from the side bar with none of the amped anxiety you’d get from a noise or techno crowd. Most everyone discussed the fourth-quarter score of the NBA Finals game that had been showing on the TV screens above the bar.

So when the first full-band note blasted from the brass onstage and the PA speakers flanking it, I was unprepared. My shoulders squeezed, and I could almost feel my inner ear going to work, powering down unnecessary receptors and bracing for punishment. I don’t remember much about the first song the Rebirth Brass Band played that night, or about any individual tune for that matter, but I’ll never forget the sheer physicality of the timbre, the sheets of metallic buzz whipping my face and chest. Often when we’re enveloped by sound, it’s low-end that does the hugging – sound waves below a certain frequency are larger than we are, and when they hit a human body they loop around it and keep propagating more or less unhindered. The relentless thump of techno or the sustained rumble of early dubstep can add up to something extreme, but there’s warmth in that immersion, like floating in a wave pool.

In the Maple Leaf, the notes were higher and the sound waves hit like tiny hailstones. It felt like the band members were throwing their horns into the crowd. The room flooded with mid-frequencies and beyond, the brass like fire hoses of upper harmonics. The band squeezed every last bit of air from their lungs, but what came out through the horns sounded like something more. This wall of sound, if you could bring yourself to listen closely, was comprised of individual solos held together by a deceptively easy beat, carrying a joy that could have easily doubled as keening sorrow. I glanced around the stage trying to find the source of each one, but eventually I just reveled in the heaviness of it all.

When the music ended, everything went dull. I wanted to tell my friend how literally blown away I’d been by the music, how unfathomably fucking hard Rebirth had gone, but conversation was basically pointless, even painful. As the taxi home rumbled over New Orleans’ innumerable potholes, a rattling tinnitus began filling in the new gaps in my hearing. I thought about my friend, who looked just as shell-shocked, enduring the usually inane hum of the air-conditioning system in his office tomorrow morning and grimaced. Then I remembered the jet engines I’d face when I flew out the next morning and groaned – probably audibly, but who knows?

Header image: Carlo Cruz/Red Bull Content Pool