Tremè Brass Band plays the music of a people. The people in New Orleans who celebrate life with a Second Line celebration or mourn a person's death with a Jazz Funeral. Tremè Brass Band represents the best of the New Orleans marching brass band tradition. Their music is steeped in the deep roots of New Orleans Jazz. Today, Second Line Celebrations can add New Orleans rhythm and joy to any celebration.
The band takes its name from the Treme neighborhood in downtown New Orleans. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, and early in the city's history was the main neighborhood of Free People of Color. It remains an important center of the city's African-American culture, especially the modern brass band tradition. In 2006, Treme Brass Band was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
View a video of Tremè Brass Band at a 2007 Second Line Celebration. For more information about Tremè Brass Band , visit their Web page on the Arhoolie Foundation website.
New Orleans brass band music was around before Jazz and is still the hottest sound on New Orleans streets. For a while, brass bands died out with the old-timers who had put it on the national map in the 1920s and 1930s. But brass bands came back strong thanks to the work of Danny Barker, a banjo player who set out to train young musicians in the classic repertoire. His students went on to form the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which took the basic marching band instrumentation and rhythms and applied them to everything from old standards to Bebop, Rhythm and Blues, and television theme songs. Dozens of bands followed the Dirty Dozen.
Among the strongest is the Tremé Brass Band, named for the neighborhood that has nurtured many of New Orleans's greatest musicians. Led by the percussion team of Uncle Benny Jones and Uncle Lionel Batiste, the Trémé band specializes in the jazzed-up hymn tunes that have been the stock in trade of marching bands playing for the city's famous jazz funeral parades, as well as a wide grab-bag of old-time jazz numbers and some hot originals. With Mervin Campbell on trumpet, the band has one of the best young soloists on the current scene, and is an intergenerational standard-bearer for the marching band tradition.
The Treme Brass Band expertly draws on both worlds to create what sounds like primitive Dixieland married to a rock-steady groove. It embodies what has allowed New Orleans brass band music to endure for more than a hundred years: a loose-as-a-goose, swinging parade beat that absorbs various influences and produces true ‘soul’ music, a synthesis of the secular and the sacred in performances marked by exquisite musicianship.
The Tremè Brass Band:
Benny Jones Sr. - snare drum; Lionel Batiste Sr. - bass drum & vocals; Eddie King, Jr. – trombone; Mervin Campbell – trumpet; Charles Joseph - trombone ; Elliott Callier - saxophone: Jeffery Hills - tuba ; Oswald Jones – Grand Marshall