WOMAD

Youngblood Brass Band

From United States

Famous people to come out of Wisconsin – how many can you name? Harry Houdini, Liberace, Orson Welles, The Fonz… Soon to be added to the list is an 18-legged groove machine from the state capital of Madison, desperate to show that even the chilly prairie lands of the Midwest can offer the occasional musical harvest. These nine pairs of legs belong to the Youngblood Brass Band, a collective so damn funky you’d swear they were natives of New Orleans. And it’s the Big Easy that’s the hub of their musical inspiration, especially the young brass bands who emerged towards the end of the 1980s to breathe several lungfuls of life back into one of the city’s most venerable traditions (“funkifying” they called it). While acknowledging the groundbreaking outfits like the mighty ReBirth Brass Band, Youngblood have brought things even further forward by brilliantly marrying hip-hop to the horn attack, in the process employing the services of A-list rappers like Talib Kweli and Mike Ladd. And their music is one seriously joyful noise, a unified wall of sound and positivity that marks them out as the brass band equivalent of Ozomatli or Antibalas. Arthur Fonzarelli would certainly approve.