Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are 8 brothers – sons of jazz legend Phil Cohren (Sun Ra Arkestra) – I spoke to Cid from the band last week…
“All of us are like directly 8 years apart from early 30s to 24 – but the thing is, like my daddy always said – because one of us would be 15 and another would be 8 – we would all be like 12 – ‘cos we went through everything together – they’d call us the wolf pack”
As young men, though music wasn’t necessarily so much as a choice – it was something that was expected of them by their dad – “how it was, was that our dad had a philosophy if (you) lived in his house you did music … if family members needed to stay a while he’d put a bass in their hand…”
And he was a task-master evidently – as Cid tells it : “When you’re a kid you wanna try everything… but you start seeing the dedication and the hard work it takes you’re like “Aw I’m ready to quit” – but he was “No you’re not – you’re sticking with it!” – we wanted to try and shy away from it but it was mandatory in our house…”
I wondered how rebellious the brother were.. “Sometimes in music class…we’d play real complex tunes of his that he wrote and we’d play them wrong to just frustrate him and irritate him to just get class over with faster – there was only so much he could take.”
“When we were older, we were always trying to stretch off to do our own thing because we were our father’s sons… it was only once we left and weren’t training with him any more that we started realizing how much the teaching and training had really impacted us.”
In nineties the brothers were involved in hip hop world production and some of them were rapping, but in ’99 they started to jam brass together again – it started off as just six of them – and they realized that they needed to put down the rap and production and focus on this – they realized they could touch people with the music outside of language – “just looking back it was kinda what were meant to do anyway – it felt good to step back intp that role of our purpose and destiny”.
Since doing that they’ve worked with some of the hip hop greats :
“Yeah, some of the greats who we used to listen to – we ended up doing a tour with Wu Tang and a track with Ghostface Killah – Mos Def was our idol – and then we were the Mos Def Big Band…”
I wondered what their dad thinks of what they are up to …
“We did the Blue Note Jazz Festival together and he told us that we have the sharpest songs he’s heard for so long – and that just meant a lot hear that from him – and he is proud, we have other siblings who didn’t continue the path that he started and he’s elated…”
There are more siblings ? “We have a huge family… we have another 12 siblings from our dad and our moms… we’re from Mississippi” he adds like that’s the explanation.
“That’s our attitude now – if you’re cool with us – all we know how to act with you is family, cos that what it was (growing up) – it was (either) family or strangers – it was never friends or associates … we’re that with our fans to this day – i guess it’s the Hypnotic Family… “
Listen to the audio of the interview here…
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11min 43sec
HYPNOTIC BRASS ENSEMBLE play NZ :
FRIDAY 20th JULY – BODEGA, WELLINGTON
SATURDAY 21st JULY – POWERSTATION, AUCKLAND
tix fromTICKETMASTER, REAL GROOVY & ROUGH PEEL MUSIC
