Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Lumar LeBlanc, founder of the New Orleans-based Soul Rebels Brass Band, about learning the ropes in the French Quarter and how Hurricane Katrina eventually helped draw attention to the band.
CP: You and Derrick Moss founded Soul Rebels after leaving the Young Olympians Brass Band. When was that and why did you decide to form your own group?
LL: Well, actually, it was a merger. What occurred was that Dejean’s Olympia Brass Band is an institution here in New Orleans, as far as brass band music goes. They’re a godfather of many brass band musicians, including the Dirty Dozen and bands like that. They have their foot deep seated in the tradition, and they brought us along as the Young Olympians, the junior version of their band, so we had a deep dose of New Orleans jazz music.
Being that we were so young at the time, we grew up with the hip-hop, R&B era of the ’80s and ’90s, so we wanted to incorporate some of that into the music. We didn’t want to disrespect what Olympia was doing. So when we were doing gigs where we saw that the audience liked the younger styles of music, we said, “Man, we gotta come up with another name for those gigs and be another band.”
We were going to the be Eight Ball Brass Band, but Cyril Neville of the Neville Brothers who named us said that connoted negativity. He said, “Why don’t you all be the Soul Rebels? That’s what you sound like.” We thought that was an awesome name, so we took the name of Soul Rebels. That’s how we merged into that band.
CP: When was that?
LL: That was in 1990, bleeding into early 1991.
CP: Just after that, you put out a tribute to Louis Armstrong. You guys didn’t waste much time.
LL: Yeah, we actually had started learning that repertoire. That’s a whole traditional piece that was a tribute to Louis. We were in the wood shed, as they say, from 1990 on up to that recording. We’d already done an enormous amount of gigs as the Young Olympians. We had already done a number of gigs as the Young Olympians, so we were quite used to the stage to be ready to be the Soul Rebels.
Cyril Neville had a group of his younger generation of kids and his brothers and sisters’ children called Deaf Generation. They were doing some of the precursors to what the Soul Rebel did, but they had guitars and a drum set and keyboards, so they weren’t exactly a brass band but more of a regular R&B or rock and funk band with elements of New Orleans in their music.
CP: When you got started, you and Derrick were playing on the streets. What’s it like being a street musician in New Orleans? What’s that culture like?
LL: Boy, it’s a beautiful experience, for me. I learned so much, not only music-wise but the savvy, the persona, how to conduct yourself around musicians and how to be a well-polished tool. On the streets, that’s some raw learning, like being on the playground for ball player. You learn idiosyncrasies and subtle innuendos you won’t necessarily learn in the band room or in an school, educational setting.
Being on the streets, you learn all kinds of tools in their raw element. It just was awesome. You feel the people first hand, without any stage separating you from your audience. At that time, the tip money you get from playing on the streets – you actually feel like that’s a million dollars. (Laughs.) We were young, and I won’t say immature, but so young and adventurous at the time that we were honored to be getting money to basically do the street thing.
I used to run out there. I was straight out of college, and even though I had a regular job, I couldn’t wait to take off my clothes from work and go run and hustling in the quarter. We would play at Aunt Sally’s and also in the (French) Quarter on the corner of St. Pete and Royal or something like that. That was our corner.
We called it the Square, where St. Louis Cathedral is, and if you can imagine, that was like the Apollo Theater. You had all the bands out there, all the brass bands.
You had to trade off sets. You couldn’t just come out there and say, “I’m going to hold down this particular part for four hours.” You had to get together and communicate with the other bands, work as a unit and say, “OK, you take the first set, and when you finish, I’ll start.” All of us were out there. It was an awesome experience.
CP: Is the New Orleans sound that you, as natives, naturally incorporate into your music or is it something you consciously add to the mix?
LL: No, it’s natural. Being from New Orleans, we can’t help but inevitably emanate what’s in us. We have so many elements of music in us. Like I said, being that we all went to the different schools in New Orleans in the early ’70s, the programs were so rich. You had to learn symphony and concert music, and you had this jazz going on around you naturally that you would get in your ear and then you had all the R&B and rock and whatever elements you got from the radio.
You can’t help but, being from New Orleans, having your music have that beat, that New Orleans syncopated beat, that you might hear in The Meters and the brass bands. Then, you have that old-school R&B feel that comes from Fats Domino up to people like Dr. John and that Professor Long Hair syncopation. It just comes out in your music. It’s somewhere in New Orleans music, and it comes out in us. We don’t have to try and do that; it comes out naturally.
CP: What elements of playing on the streets carries over to your work with the Soul Rebels?
LL: One of my early friends in the game was James Andrews, who is Trombone Shorty’s older brother. He was one of the first I encountered when I started getting into this music on a professional level. My first professional introduction was hustling in the square. You had to realize how seriously they took it when we were out there at that time.
It influenced me so much and us so much that it comes out in a Soul Rebels show. It’s that unbridled approach like Louis Armstrong. You’re not bashful or timid and afraid on the stage. By doing that so much in the quarters, when you get to an actual, hired performance at a stage setting like at Tipitina’s or The House of Blues, you’ve been doing it so much on the street that that’s nothing to you.
You can see the joy and fascination in the people who think you’ve been practicing for hours, and really, what you’ve been doing is honing your talent on the streets for hours hustling. That’s how it happens with Soul Rebels.
With Soul Rebels, I must admit that some of the training in college, the mentality and showmanship of the band also comes in like you would see in these college marching bands. We have a heavy dose of that also because we all went to college. That’s another element of showmanship that comes out in a Soul Rebels show. You might see some dance steps. You might see some horn movements together. You might see some of the crowd chant and response.
The other side of it is from the jazz element, you see the singing, the harmony and trying to the next person and stay in tune.
P: You’re kind of a melting pot of all those styles, including that unusual mixture of New Orleans jazz/funk with some fairly strong hip-hop/R&B. When you started the Soul Rebels, did you find that those two genres mix well together naturally or did it take work to get them to cooperate?
LL: It came naturally. When you first start playing a tune like, “Monday Date,” which is a tune we play that Louis Armstrong sung, you find yourself, from a drum standpoint, incorporating some of the rhythms you learned from the streets of New Orleans and from the marching band element. That’s how it happens with the music.
When you move on to “Mardi Gras New Orleans,” that’s a little bit more pulsating, a little bit more drive, you definitely have that New Orleans marching band and New Orleans syncopated feel in there.
You just find ways to incorporate it. It’s like what Dr. J and Michael Jordan did for basketball. They were able to bring things that were taught on the playground, ghetto courts and bring it to the professional ranks. When they dunked the ball, that was stuff that was done on the playground, but we saw it when it was done on the big screen. That’s what we did with the music. You just get the end result, but it’s the stuff that had already been done on the streets.
I mean, obviously, when you’re trying to create a tune for an album, when you go to the studio, you get serious and try to put out the best piece possible. That’s when you dissect something and put it together to make sense so hopefully, it will be appealing to someone who wants to buy music. You always have that form of creating, but in its raw form, it just happens.
CP: Has that hip-hop/R&B flavor to your music helped to broaden your audience? Has it closed you off any from fans of more traditional New Orleans jazz?
LL: To be blunt, for us, it helps because of our set up. When people see the tuba, you don’t have many bands were the bass is a big sousaphone tuba. When people see the big tuba and the big bass drum separate from me playing the snare, where it’s not a traditional drum set like Ringo Starr would play, you already get their attention that it’s New Orleans.
That helps for people to see that, even if they play an R&B/funk tune, they’re still New Orleans by their setup. It helps us get people you might not normally get.
No offense to Jay-Z or Beyoncé, but sometimes, Jay-Z only caters to people who love rap. Fortunately, he’s broadened out to capture a wider audience, but he might not capture someone who’s strictly into jazz or strictly into folk music. Whereas with us, we can capture all of that because of the way we play and sound. We can play a funk tune or a heavy blues tune with a funk feel; we’ve even did something in a country vibe. It broadens our audience.
CP: Do you find that over the last 20 years, the balance of the Soul Rebels’ sound has shifted more in favor or the traditional New Orleans sound or the R&B/funk/hip-hop sound?
LL: We try to get a balance. We try to still give you something that’s authentic New Orleans and then to play also some of the music like what we were raised around. I think we still have that balance, I think.
Definitely, I would say we were one of the major integrators of putting more modern music into a solid, older tradition. We take it to another level. Someone who’s strictly traditional might say we’re not traditional, that the Soul Rebels are all modern and commercial music, but we know we’re not. We still have the old spiritual hymns we play, the old dirges that have been going on in New Orleans music for 100 years. Then, we also do our own spin on the music. There’s a balance that exists.
CP: After Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, some of the band ended up moving away. Was there any danger of you breaking up permanently? What kept you together?
LL: In my mind and heart, I never envisioned it, I didn’t want it to happen, but we were faced with all types of critical decisions when Katrina hit. Your family was your primary concern. We were actually on tour before Katrina started. We had a major storm they thought was going to hit a few weeks earlier when we were in Colorado, so we had to abort that tour and fly home early to secure our homes and families, but the storm didn’t hit.
Then, we went back out of town to Houston, and when we got back in town the next week, Katrina hit. We were definitely on the road to doing our touring when Katrina hit. When the storm hit, we still had gigs we were supposed to do in other parts of America, and they were still expecting us to come. But once they saw the devastation and the reality of Katrina, they had gracious hearts and didn’t hold us to those contracts.
I always had the intention of getting the band back up and working. I don’t think, in anybody’s mind, they actually thought we’d never play again as the Soul Rebels, but it was a very hard process because everyone had left New Orleans and were in different parts of the country.
The bad thing was, most of us didn’t take our instruments. A sousaphone tuba is about $6,500, so you can imagine that you don’t have that kind of money when you’ve lost your house and everything. That was the hardest obstacle: Getting the instruments.
People were willing to give bands from New Orleans work, just to help the relief. That’s actually when the popularity of the band skyrocketed, after Katrina. I got calls from CNN and the New York Times – major publications and media – asking if the Soul Rebels could come and play, that they wanted to help and show people this New Orleans music that might have been lost. But we didn’t have the instruments.
Once we got the instruments, we got back into it, and I decided that I was going to do this full time. I haven’t done anything else ever since. It’s been a big reward. (Laughs.)
CP: I think your manager said you’re going into the studio today. Are you working on a follow up to “No Place Like Home”?
LL: Yeah, we’re always creating music for the next piece. We want to have a big library of music to pull from. It’s a constant motion of creating. We often get together and just vibe with each other so everyone’s creative juices can be expressed in the music. That’s all we’re doing.
We say we’re going in the studio because you never know what magic can come out of the session, and we want to have it recorded so we can remember it. We’re not recording an album, we’re just getting together for one of our weekly pow-wows to see what music comes out.
Definitely, we’re starting to work on the follow up to that (“No Place Like Home”), which will be whenever we get our mind and energy together to say, “OK, we’ve done some stuff we want to put out and it’s got some meaning behind it.” That’ll be the next CD.
CP: Have you got a rough mental deadline for when you’d like to see it out?
LL: Oh no, not really. We’re obviously talking to some record companies now. We don’t like to just rush things. I know how the industry is that if you don’t put out a piece that, sometimes, people can forget about you, but we don’t want to worry about that. We want to put it out when we feel it’s the right time. Everything is in the exploratory stage right now. I’m sure something will be coming up in 2011 or maybe 2012, I’m sure.