One
would expect the sons of a Sun Ra Arkestra veteran would naturally take to
music. Their somewhat unconventional upbringing is hardly surprising either.
Yet, the members of the eight-brothers strong Hypnotic Brass Ensemble both
honor and reject their father’s musical legacy in ways that generate real
tension throughout Brothers Hypnotic (trailer here) Reuben Atlas’s
behind-the-scenes look at the brassy jam-band, which airs this Monday on PBS,
as part of the current season of Independent Lens.
After
early stints with the Jay McShann and the U.S. Navy bands, Phil Cohran signed
up with the Arkestra while it was based in Chicagoland. When Sun Ra continued
on his galactic journey, Cohran helped co-found the AACM. For a while, he was
also the director of the Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble (which could have passed for
the Arkestra’s children’s auxiliary), but as soon as one Cohran brother left
the fold, the entire ensemble deflated.
In
a sense, they were reborn as Hypnotic, a jazz and funk influenced jam-band
somewhat in the tradition of the Hot 8 Brass Band and their New Orleans
contemporaries, but utilizing a strictly brass-only instrumentation. They have
a great sound (particularly when they are not incorporating just okay raps into
the mix). You can hear a bit of their father in there, but there are plenty of
other elements in the mix as well.
Atlas
does an excellent job documenting the ironic realities of a jazz (or jazz-ish)
musician’s life. One minute you are eating cold Spaghetti-O’s out of the can,
but the very next day you might be off on a seat-of-the-pants European tour. The
filmmaker caught the Ensemble at a fortuitous time, when they were still giving
street performances (which are highly cinematic), but were also fielding offers
from legitimate labels. Musicians who tune in might get a nasty case of
heartburn when they turn down Atlantic Records, but you have to give them credit
for staying true to the convictions they inherited from their father.
Unfortunately, the broadcast edit of Brothers
H never allows a musical performance to continue long enough to give
viewers a truly vivid sense of the ensemble’s full force.
