Sousaphone Colossus
The Rebirth Brass Band play Saint Rocke Friday night. It’s hard to keep a good tuba player down. Phillip “Tuba” Frazier, stalwart sousaphonist for the Rebirth Brass Band, was kept off the stage for the first time in a quarter century after suffering a stroke in December of 2008. He and his brother, bass drummer Keith Frazier, first began playing with the band back in 1982 and have very rarely stopped playing since. But even when he was in the hospital, somebody smuggled his tuba in. Soon, Frazier was sitting upright in his bed, playing tuba, much to the delight of his fellow patients. “They loved it,” Frazier recalled. “That was my therapy. It got me back on my feet.” The Frazier brothers – belovedly known as “the bass brothers” in New Orleans, where the tuba often provides the bass line of choice – have been getting everybody on their feet for 27 years now. It took more than a stroke to stop “Tuba” Frazier, the bandleader and one of the pioneering tuba players in the brass band renaissance that flowered in the 1980s. Almost miraculously, he was back on stage within two months. Frazier co-founded the band with trumpeter Kermit Ruffins when he and most of the band were still…
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