Sometimes the best ideas are formed in the most unusual times, and for Brass Queens … the most unusual places.
The six-piece New Orleans-inspired brass band, which calls Brooklyn, NY their home, found themselves in a most unusual position — having a night off. The night off allowed them to soak their weary bones in a hot tub, and that’s when their best idea (to date) struck them like the blare from a trumpet — recording their first album of original music.
The result of this thunderclap of inspiration lead to the band recording and releasing their first album, Hot Tub Sessions Vol. 1. The album finds the Queens carving out their own niche in the brass scene with sonic savvy and unabashed enthusiasm.
Recently, we caught up with Alex Harris (trumpet) to discuss how a brass born was born in Brooklyn, the pandemic’s impact on the band, the inspiration in a hot tub and their goals for the future.
In 2019, the band formed after Alex Harris and Ally Chapel recruited six other musicians to join and form Brass Queens. How difficult was it to find six musicians, in the greater New York area, to form a New Orleans-inspired brass band?
We actually started as a much larger band. We had to have been closer to 16 people at the start. We already knew so many wonderful female musicians just from playing in bands around the city that it wasn’t hard to find them, but certain instruments were more challenging than others. Drums and trombones took a little more time to settle in. The pandemic forced us to scale down our size and also allowed us to really find our musical voice as a band.
What is it about the New Orleans style of brass that inspired you to form this band?
The New Orleans brass band scene exposed us to a world where playing music felt really welcoming and community driven. Something about it feels really accessible. We have experienced firsthand the generosity of the brass bands in New Orleans as they’ve shared their music with us and given us the green light to share it with our audience! We go to New Orleans every year as a band and treat it as an immersive homework assignment to study the musical tradition and do it justice in our translation of it. Over the years we have built relationships with those bands, collaborate with them, and consider them friends.
In an article with Relix the band talks about injecting a New York-style into the traditional New Orleans second line tradition? Can you explain this more in-depth?
When we think of our New York style we think high-energy. Our sound has to be as big as the buildings to cut through the density of the city. I think that’s kind of a metaphor for how we see ourselves too. The music scene is so saturated, you’ve got to find your own way to carve a path through, especially as the first all-female brass band in NYC. That headstrong attitude, never slowing down mindset that people think of when they think of New Yorkers definitely has its place in our trajectory. Modern and traditional New Orleans music tends to settle into a single groove or idea – they call it the Big Easy for a reason. Our music is very dynamic, which is indicative of our New York home. Traditionally second line music should only be played as fast as you can walk, we’ve adopted that groove, but more at a New Yorker’s pace. New York is also a melting pot of so many different cultures, so you’ll find a lot of those different influences in our arrangements and original music as well.
During the pandemic the band gained popularity playing pop ups and busking outdoors — how did these experiences help shape you all as a band?
Playing in the park was just a way to keep ourselves sane during those early days of quarantine. We knew we needed to keep playing music because that’s what feeds our soul, and it turns out that a lot of people were missing listening to live music. So getting hired to play “Happy Birthday” outside someone’s stoop was a way for us to connect with our community. We feel like such celebrities when we’re walking down the street in those neighborhoods now (with and without instruments) and often get recognized and stopped by people wanting to tell us how awesome this or that performance was years ago. This has made us feel connected to our community even as time has passed. Playing so frequently during that time also gave us the opportunity to experiment and try new music. It’s one thing to rehearse, but we have always felt that our music really takes its final form once we’ve been able to perform it a lot.
Can you talk about how important the “hot tub hang” inspired the name of your most recent album? From interviews, it seems like this was a turning point for the band?
Nobody knew how important that hot tub session was going to be for us, we were just excited to have a night off! 2023 was an amazing and intense year: we recorded an entire album in two days, we started touring in earnest, and we won the Rider’s Choice Award. It was a whirlwind, so the fact that we had a moment to relax and had space to rest and reflect together turned out to be this huge spark of inspiration for us. That evening was a major source of renewal for the band because we got to take time to be proud of what we’d accomplished and get excited about what we wanted to create in the future. The result was putting out our first album of all original music, and that has been the true turning point.
The name of the album is Hot Tub Sessions Vol.1 — can we assume Vol. 2 is not far off?
We’ve found a lot of success in making things happen and getting it done. We have never waited for something to come to us, or hoped for an opportunity without doing the work to make it possible. We put Vol. I in the title as a way to hold ourselves accountable and as a promise to our community that we plan to be here for them. If you know us, you can assume it’s not far off at all.
What is it that you love being in this band?
We’ve created an environment for ourselves where we feel safe experimenting musically, whether that’s soloing or bringing in new original music. Everyone comes to this project with varying levels of experience, but we can all be supportive of each other. Maybe it’s a result of the nature of our type of ensemble, we have no lead like a singer or prominent voice, so the musical responsibility is shared equally among everyone and it’s less about battling egos, which we imagine is an issue other bands face. We also love spending time together. This makes touring fun, and even if we weren’t playing you’d still find us hanging out, making a random dinner or watching Survivor together.
In interviews you’ve mentioned the importance of Brooklyn in the success of Brass Queens. How did this city support the band?
Literally the fact that we all live in Brooklyn meant that we were able to get together during the pandemic. We didn’t need to worry about crossing a bridge or a river in order to meet up in the park. And like we said, we were just practicing, but people would sit and enjoy listening to us work something out. They would even tip us even though we weren’t asking for it! One of those rehearsals is still one of the highest amounts we’ve ever made playing on the “street.” Those people that enjoyed what we were doing were also the people that gave us our first gigs, came to our first shows, and made us a part of their big life events such as birthdays, weddings, and cancer survival celebrations. It meant so much to us to be able to connect with people in that way during that time, it has had a huge impact on the way we approach music.
What are five things the band is looking forward to in 2025?
- New music!
- A couple of international tour stops
- Getting to the west coast for the first time as a band
- Getting to new corners of the country to show everyone that Ladies Kick Brass!
