Brass Bands Quotes

What's New Orleans without music? And what's music without dancing?

In New Orleans, people are still influenced by one another. You got these bands that play every week on Frenchmen Street, and on their breaks, they might go see the reggae band that's right next door. You might get the musicians from the reggae band to sit in with the brass musicians. Everyone is having fun.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

I've grown up in the Treme, and I played in a bunch of brass bands. My brother, James Andrews, had a brass band.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band.

Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a couple of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band.

In New Orleans, music is part of the culture. You're raised with it, from the cradle to the grave, and all in-between.

Music and dance is part of everything in New Orleans. So I grew up appreciating it all.

New Orleans, more than many places I know, actually tangibly lives its culture. It's not just a residual of life; it's a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth, marriage, death. It's our culture.

New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

I grew up right in the heart of Treme, so it was a real music neighborhood, and there was a bunch of bands like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band around.

As you'll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?

From the food to the Mardi Gras Indians to the brass bands and the second liners parading through the street, Jazz Fest presents New Orleans in one place.

New Orleans is like a big musical gumbo. The sound I have is from being in the city my whole life.

I find brass bands have a melancholy sound. All right out of doors, of course - fifty miles away. Like bagpipes, they turn what had been a dream into a public nuisance.

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.

Brass bands are part of my upbringing. Brass band records were among the first records I listened to.

we Irish don't really need thousands of people surging behind a big brass band to have a parade. One guitar player and a few people whistling will do the job.

I was brought up on choirs and brass bands. They formed the music of my childhood. When I heard the Treorchy Male Choir at the Royal Variety Performance it brought back such happy memories. You have your own eminent place in the history of British music. You stand for excellence in a great tradition and your work for charity is both an example and an inspiration.