HONK! - Bands

Titubanda

Titubanda is a 35 piece brass band from Rome, Italy, playing everything from traditional Italian folk songs to avant-guard jazz via Latin American rhythms and Arabic melodies. A musical journey from Cuba to Bombay, through the Balkans and Cairo, reinterpreting classics and inspiring original compositions. Omnivorous, and with a robust appetite, the band loves not only traditional homely recipes but also exotic cuisine, spicy dishes - sometimes with the odd acid flavour.

Titubanda - the “Wavering Band” - was born on may 1st 1998 as an open collective, a musical workshop where everyone can play and share the pleasure of making music. Rejecting merit and profit criteria and without any internal hierarchy, the group is not only a focus for the flourishing of cultural and social diversity and action, but is also the bearer of these values into the wider community, taking part in political demonstrations and social initiatives. The band’s presence in city streets has a poetic impact in contrast with the dehumanizing rhythms and rampant individualism of Western society. Its music creates immediate involvement, awakening deeply repressed emotions and unleashing the desire to celebrate together in public spaces.

To its social commitment, Titubanda adds a passion for revelry that has taken the band to major festivals of street bands throughout Italy and Europe: Munich, Germany; Paris and Montpellier, France; Guca, Serbia; Bilbao, Spain, and many others. In tune with this ethos, the band itself promotes and organizes the “Sbandata Romana”, an international street band festival that occurred for the third time in 2005. Celebrating ten years of activity, Titubanda will cross the Atlantic for the first time in October, 2008, to tour the East Coast of the United States, playing in Providence, at the Honk! Festival of activist street bands in Boston, and in New York City.

Titubanda’s ultimate and legendary - though not unreachable - aim is to succeed in playing a well-tuned A minor chord!!

Watch and listen to the Titubanda on YouTube

Himalayas

In the year of the Black Horse, circa two thousand two, on the banks of the mighty Hudson River, a nameless band was born to the loving parents of
saxophonist Jonathon Haffner, percussionist Jennifer Harris and bass drummer Kenny Wollesen. Endowed with the gifted ability to be mobile, electric, and acoustic, the band began its odyssey, producing sounds that inspire people to move in ways never thought possible, physically, mentally and spiritually. By March 2003 during the Love Not War parade, the band quickly reached maturity on the streets on New York City. Followed by a well balanced diet of gigs of astonishing variety, plus a constant influx of New York's finest musicians, the band grew and the songbook filled too, mixed with a cache of original music from some of today's brilliant composers(Frisell, Zorn, Bernstein Apfelbaum, Wilson, Mottel, Wieselman). Through the rings of its growth, many names came along to refer to "the marching band", some sticking longer than others, yet each one reflecting the here and now.

Venues: multimedia performances (Anthology Film Archives); massive puppet shows (with NYC Puppeteers Collective, ImaginationExplosion, Great Small Works); cultural festivals (Lincoln Center Outdoors, CitySol, River TO River); community parades (Gay Pride, South Bronx Earth Day); Peace of Love ceremonies (RNC, May Day); music-making workshops for children of the South Bronx and Lower East Side; a spectacular 150-person performance at 2005 Celebrate Brooklyn (known then as S.L.A.M.); a month-long residency with legendary conductor Lawrence "Butch" Morris; special guest appearances (Medeski, Martin and Wood, Brazilian Girls); operas, studio recordings, and a weekly stint at the surrealist bar Zebulon in Williamsburg. Currently, the band can be seen in film great Jonas Mekas' web film "365 films"

Listen to Himalayas on MySpace

Brass Messengers

The Brass Messengers of Minneapolis, MN, formed from the annual rubble of of the Heart of the Beast Mayday Parade and Ceremony in Minneapolis. Each year, the parade came and went, puppets packed, park cleaned, summer began and the founding members of the BMers left feeling like our work was unfinished, again. Having compiled years of mobile brass scores for ourselves, we took to making it an ongoing affair. Now we dine together (playing music), we take the train (playing music), bike (carrying our instruments, singing), camp (playing music), and bring the party wherever we end up. We started as a street band playing the music of the Carribean (Ska) and Balkans (Fanfare Ciocarlia), but now play anywhere from the small stages of local bars, where we have throw a country song to the crying drinkers, to Northeast Minneapolis, where a high speed polka or two is essential, to parties for kids, where we get to run in circles with many small children (that is the brass band dance for the under 6 crowd), to gatherings of our activist kin, where a fiery Bella Ciao prepares us for the mean world out there, to the big stage, where we try to play in tune. Our music of choice is anything that fits in the twisted brass tubing, from originals to "covers" from around the globe, as long as it makes a joyful noise.

We have played on Lake Street in Minneapolis, in Powderhorn Park, on 13th Street NE, Cross Lake, Minnesota, Hammond, Wisconsin, etc.... We have also played the stages of the Fiztgerald Theater in St. Paul, The First Avenue, Cedar Cultural Center, Minnesota State Fair, Walker Art Center, Orpheum Theater and earlier this summer, Megan's Birthday Party.st.

Listen to Brass Messengers on MySpace

Loyd Family Players

Born in Chico, raised up at Burning Man, and brought to urban fruition in Oakland, California, the Loyd Family Players take the pulse of traditional Brazilian samba and twist it into a loud, sweaty, sexy muss that's all their very own. The ten-to-twenty-person coed percussion troupe swipes elements from hip-hop, dancehall, punk rock, drum n'bass, summer camp...anything goes. With members hailing from such exotic locales as England, Brazil, Rome, Peru, Antarctica, and Long Island, the Loyds are a foxy, unstoppable (and unstoppably foxy) dance machine. In the last several years the Loyds have earned a reputation as a commanding and jubilant festival band for their massive, moving performances. These shows sweep people into the parade, whether the band is passing through fairgrounds or taking the floor during a set change, making for an inclusive musical experience that keeps the band with the people and the people inside the music.