![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/d-town_brass.jpg\")
Much of what passes for avant garde music tends toward a kind of seriousness, a dour approach that screams, \u201cthis is art!\u201d and all but insists that the listeners revel in its importance. Accessibility rarely figures into the mix, and that\u2019s the point, kind of. But there are exceptions. The work of Sun Ra certainly qualifies as an exception: it\u2019s way out-there for sure, but there\u2019s a playfulness, a giddy sense of fun, that characterizes much of the music.<\/p>\n
Sun Ra has long since left us, but his spirit does live on. One exponent of his mindset is a North Carolina (and\/or New York City)-based big band called D Town Brass. They describe their music as \u201cpre-post-apocalyptic funk,\u201d among other epithets. It\u2019s weird, for sure. But it\u2019s fun stuff. On \u201cCorporate Life Form,\u201d Honking, squawking horns compete fr supremacy against a rhythmic bed that sounds not unlike Yes\u2019 \u201cChanges,\u201d of all things.\u201d Spoken word sections suggest everything from Discipline-era King Crimson (specifically \u201cElephant Talk\u201d) to Squirrel Nut Zippers to the Tubes\u2019 \u201cWild Women of Wongo.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a pleasingly anti-establishment, anti-status quo perspective that underpins these tunes. It\u2019s crazy stuff, grabbing the big band sound and dragging it \u2013 willingly or not \u2013 into the 21st<\/sup> century. The songs rock, and in many ways D-Town Brass seems to share an aesthetic with Fred Pallem\u2019s Le Sacre du Tympan as well as Norway\u2019s Jagga Jazzist. But really, those touchstones or musical guideposts can only tell the reader so much about D-Town Brass.<\/p>\n The music truly has to be heard; sometimes it gets weird, as with the cacophonous \u201cCheap Dimensions.\u201d \u201cLate Melody\u201d is atmospheric and alluring. \u201cHuman Resources\u201d will appeal to fans of the Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge outfit The Midnight Hour. \u201cGood Cop\u201d has the feel of classic \u201860s era crime and spy jazz. And \u201cDemon\u201d — the album’s best track — feels like \u201870s cinematic funk, albeit with more politically charged spoken word bits.<\/p>\n There are elements of kitsch at work on cuts like \u201cCobbler\u2019s Dream.\u201d That tune might suggest Frank Zappa to some ears; others won\u2019t know quite what to make of it all, but they\u2019ll be intrigued nonetheless. Happily for those who open themselves to the ensemble\u2019s unique music, there lies within it a wealth of material; the group has been releasing music since 2013, and there\u2019s much more to discover. But Demiurge<\/i> is a fine place from which to begin that journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much of what passes for avant garde music tends toward a kind of seriousness, a dour approach that screams, \u201cthis is art!\u201d and all but insists that the listeners revel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20564,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,38,42,49,65],"tags":[4461],"class_list":["post-20563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-avant-garde","category-incredibly-strange","category-jazz","category-new-release","category-review","tag-d-town-brass","cat-7-id","cat-38-id","cat-42-id","cat-49-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20565,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20563\/revisions\/20565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}