Still blowing strong – Celebrating 35 years, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band offers fresh, sleek sounds on new album

How does this band do it? Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year with the release of Twenty Dozen on Savoy Jazz, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band has laid down some of the freshest, sleekest, youngest-sounding tracks of its entire career. Meanwhile, the five founding members (trumpeters Gregory Davis and Efrem Towns, tenor saxophonist Kevin Harris, baritone saxophonist Roger Lewis, and tuba guru Kirk Joseph) along with relatively young veteran drummer Terence Higgins (who’s been with the band more than a decade now) seem as genuinely engaged and clearly motivated to break new musical boundaries as they’ve ever been.

Maybe one explanation for the band’s longevity is its members’ career-long adherence to certain founding principles. “When we put this band together,” recalls Roger Lewis, “everybody had the opportunity to play whatever kind of music they wanted to play. There was no, ‘We’re just going to play this’ or ‘We’re just going to play that.’ We were playing traditional music from New Orleans, and people would be coming in with their own compositions. After that, we started jamming a whole lot, and out of that would come something that we liked, so we’d organize that and turn it into a song. Because we were always, in a way, reinventing ourselves, we began to realize that at any one time we could go in any kind of direction.”

The Dozen drew, and continues to draw, from the Crescent City’s indigenous second-line parade beat, native R&B sounds of the day (when he joined, Lewis, the oldest now at 70, was on sabbatical from Fats Domino’s touring band) and in the more formalized world of jazz. From one end of the spectrum, the Dozen picked up strong influences from a traditional brass-band revival led by retired jazz cat Danny Barker, and from another end, modern and avant-garde influences from saxophonist and educator Edward “Kidd” Jordan, then fluent in both Chitlin’ Circuit R&B and the recently established genre of “free” jazz.

On Twenty Dozen, a strong Afro-Caribbean element inspires the entire collection, highlighted by trumpeter Towns’s reggae-styled opener “Tomorrow,” saxophonist Harris’s Calypso-flavored “Best of All,” and Higgins’s complete overhaul of the Rihanna hit “Don’t ?Stop the Music,” which transforms the song into an Afropop, soul-makossa extravaganza.

The final piece in the puzzle explaining Twenty Dozen‘s surging funk pulse and smoothly accomplished polish is the album’s stated agenda. For the band’s first new recording in more than five years, and its first collection of original music in nearly 15, each member was charged with contributing a new composition—and given the band’s strong collective identity, each of those naturally became the occasion for collaborative input, adding the ingredient of textural complexity.

It also added a sense of purpose that can only be obtained in later stages of life, as trumpeter Davis explains: “When you reach a certain age, you naturally want to get back to some of your own roots, to return to those impulses that animated your vision in the very beginning. Basically what you’re trying to do is confirm that you’ve really accomplished everything you originally set out to accomplish. And what better way to break new ground, to discover new frontiers, than to look back to where you started and make sure you really got to where you originally wanted to go.”

Based on those criteria, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, still blowing strong as it powers its way through its fourth decade of music-making, would seem to be right on course.