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 attending Alfred Lawless High School in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. They formed when a group of high school teachers asked them to play at a gathering. On the way home, a stranger on Bourbon Street saw them carrying their instruments and asked for a tune. The quick jam netted more than $100 from passersby, and the Rebirth Brass Band was suddenly on the march.
“We were too young to play [in clubs], so there was nothing to do but play in the French Quarter,” Frazier said. “Everybody liked it, so they came to my house every day.”
They’ve since toured the world and become in a real sense the very sound of New Orleans. And at that very root of that sound is Frazier, who along with the Dirty Dozen’s Kirk Joseph has been one of the great tuba innovators of modern musical history.
It’s safe to say John Phillip Sousa never saw this coming: the funky sousaphone.
Back in 1890, the American composer known as “The March King” instructed an instrument maker to construct a portable concert tuba because he was dissatisfied with the then-current state of marching affairs. The bass back then was supplied by a horn called the helicon, but Sousa wasn’t hip to its high tone.
Thus was born the sousaphone, a tuba constructed to wrap around the player’s shoulder and point up, so as to blow out a beautifully loud bass above the whole band.
Down in the rhythmic stew of New Orleans, the sousaphone has long been a respected part of the mix – this is, after all, a city where marches and parades are a central civic activity, from the jubilant marches of Mardi Gras to the funeral dirges that accompany a community member’s passing. In the 1980s, the young Rebirth Brass Band cut their musical teeth at these “jazz funerals.”
“See, in the ‘80s, crack was heavy on the scene,” Frazier said. “We did a lot of jazz funerals, because people were getting killed over crack.”
They were formally discovered at the 1983 Jazz & Heritage Festival and launched a recording career the next year that over the next three decades would fuse the modern sounds of the Crescent City – jazz, blues, soul, a big helping of funk, and even a touch of reggae.
“All sorts of things,” Frazier said. “The old and the new.”
They’ve seen more than 20 band members come and go. But the “bass brothers” themselves remain the men behind a fast bristling beat, with high-flying horns soaring above their badass groove.
“We bring the street to the stage, you know?” Frazier said.
The Rebirth Brass Band plays Saint Rocke Friday night. See www.rebirthbrassband.com for more info.