Hypnotic Brass Ensemble:  The    bad boys are back in Cork for the jazz

The members of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are no strangers to Cork at all - so familiar are they with the city by the Lee at this stage, that when your writer mentions where he’s writing from, impersonations of the more musical aspects of the Leeside blas emerge from the cacophony of voices, as our interview progresses.

Hailing from Chicago, the instrumental outfit are a live attraction around the world, combining the precision and skill of lifelong musicians with aspirations to connection, both with music’s power to move a crowd, and to the otherworldly. No surprise, considering that they’re composed almost entirely of sons of the late Phil Cohran, a legendary trumpet player, with a stint in the Sun Ra Arkestra and a legendary body of educational and facilitative work to his name.

“Our father brought us up playing jazz music or music in general - he didn't really want to classify as jazz, he felt like that was kind of a marketing tool they use to sell the music,” says trombonist Seba Graves. “But he brought us up understanding the tenets of music, so he would wake us up at six in the morning before school, teach us.

“Then after we got back from school, he would teach us and he developed us as horn players, and gave us music theory as we grew. Then we went further into our lives, y'know, as young men, you don't necessarily want to be stuck in a house playing music, so we went out and did things, and returned to music in our late teens and started the band Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.

“A lot of times hip-hop introduced us to some jazz music as well, albums like 'Midnight Marauder', 'Jazzmatazz'. All of these songs that sampled jazz music, we then got a reintroduction to them, so then we would dive into things like Charles Mingus, Freddie Hubbard, or Ornette Coleman and all these records. So it's kind of a mix between a jazz inflection, and hip hop and soul music. Because it's just music at the end of the day, right?”

Adds trumpeter Amal Baji Hubert: “The one thing that our father did teach us, is music is medicine for your soul. We felt that ‘soul’ part come back to us and that’s how Hypnotic was bred.”

The band have come to be regarded as ambassadors for the brass instruments in contemporary music, establishing a standalone body of work in what Jafar Graves emphatically calls ‘the fast, organic sound’, while collaborating with a wide range of artists, from The Clash’s Mick Jones, to Damon Albarn in his role as the bandleader of pop/multimedia spectacle Gorillaz.

“Brass just so happens to be the instruments that we knew, that our father taught us,” affirms Seba. “Our music is communal music. It's not something you do in a corner by yourself, like, it is connected. We do it to bring us together and bring other people together.”

“We sing, we dance, we rap. We do all of it. But we saw that instruments were a universal language, so we chose the instruments to put it to the forefront, because we were a rap group at one time,” adds Baji.

“The brass holds a certain resonance and holds memory, it’s a transmitter,” says Jafar in further response, “and as we go into what we do, the sound and intention that we put out behind it, that's every bit a part of our brass style.”

“There's something special about acoustic music, right? You're getting our breath through the instruments and then that vibration coming through the mouthpiece, buzzing through,” continues Seba on the matter. “The connection between the breath of one human being and another, there's something special about that acoustic sound.” 

On the topic of longrunning ties, August's single Space saw the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble collaborating with Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def.

Although mention of the name alone is enough to induce a rant from anyone who had tickets to his scheduled performances at last year’s Jazz Weekend, he remains a singularly important figure to US hip-hop, and an early friend of the band, after a chance encounter at New York Fashion Week.

“So it's 42nd Street, we used to perform a whole lot on 42nd Street in Times Square and Yasiin Bey just crept up on us, and came behind us, just like he was part of the crowd, and then just listened for a little while and watched this do our thing,” says Seba. “We would keep a pretty big crowd, but then afterwards, we noticed this was Yasiin standing behind us!”

“He was standing behind us, by our box with our CD money, and we stopped playing, like, 'who is this?' and then he took his hat off. And then we was like, 'oh!',” continues trumpet Gabriel Hubert, aka Hudah. “He's like, 'man, I'm on my way to Fashion Week, but y'all remind me of this group of musicians I saw when I was in Brazil, who was playing up under a bridge, and the same energy I got now, is the same energy I got then, and I just had to come be a part of it. Whose number can I get? I want to do some work with y'all.'

Fast forward to 2022, and the band had the opportunity to continue their collaboration on the new single.

“We were in Spain doing something, and we'd been meaning to connect and like put something together with him for a long time, it just never really... scheduling, I guess I don't know. We were in Spain, he just so happened to be out there, and guys linked up say 'hey man', come into the studio, he did and he put something to that.

“We have another feature with him, that we're going to release probably next year. It just was a perfect inflection, you know, Sun Ra would say 'space is the place' and we consider ourselves a continuation of Sun Ra, so that kind of just came together like that.

“He didn't... he fell on the word 'space'. And we thought wow, 'that's dope, y'know, staring into space'. That connects directly to our lineage, our musical lineage from Sun Ra. So we thought 'man, this is perfect to name 'Space''.”

The band is once again heading for the Jazz Weekend this year, returning to the main stage of the Opera House, a big part of that relationship with the city that’s approaching the two-decade mark.

The band is as enthused about gigging Cork and Ireland, but one dearly-departed iteration of a long-standing venue is close to the ensemble’s heart.

The Pavilion? Oh my god... we did some of the most insane shows we ever did there

“The Pavilion? Oh my god,” exclaims Seba of the Joe Kelly/Stevie G iteration of the Carey’s Lane ballroom. “We did some of the most insane shows we ever did there.”

“Cork and Ireland, the way they really vibe with us, and let loose. It's not like the audience is sitting there watching you, like, this is a collective experience. I f**king love Cork.”

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble play Cork Opera House tomorrow, Friday, October 27. Doors are at 7pm, and tickets are officially sold out.