The Brasscals Bring Honk to Santa Barbara

The Brasscals Bring Honk
to Santa Barbara

The Band Is a Raucous, Joy-infused,
Syncopated Musical Chain Reaction

By Nick Welsh | January 25, 2024

If not for a flickering, magical, and statistically improbable late-night conversation between Antoine Descos — a French research engineer in town for a job in Isla Vista — and Maria Cincotta — a musician, editor, translator, and music teacher then brand-new to town — the raucous, joy-infused, syncopated musical chain reaction now known as the Brasscals might never have come to pass. The cosmos, not to mention Santa Barbara, would have been a duller, darker place for it.

But it did. In fact, it happened several years ago, at a late-night, weekend bike ride with hundreds of riders dressed in various costumes, most draped in neon lights — think praying mantises, butterflies, robots. Cincotta remembers Descos wearing a jacket to which he’d affixed “hundreds of googly eyes.”

Descos is an enthusiastic guy who speaks in a thick French accent. Cincotta is an enthusiastic woman who radiates a big-hearted, get-shit-done resolve. In short order, Maria and Antoine both discovered that the other played saxophone. Both had survived the torture of mandatory recorder instruction as children. Both, it turns out, had played in numerous street brass bands, and both were hormonally intent on starting such a band here in Santa Barbara. 

It was kismet.

Or so it would seem.

Of course, they both forgot to get one another’s contact information. Months passed; life interrupted. COVID happened. Then nothing happened. Their moment, seemingly so pregnant with possibility, appeared squandered. 

Sometime late in 2021, Antoine was startled to stumble onto an ad for a street brass band while browsing through Craigslist. It was Maria’s. “Hey,” he quickly replied. “I think we met.” 

The first gathering of what would become the Brasscals, now a sprawling, thumping street brass brand of the “honk” variety, took place at Alameda Park on December 11, 2021. Maybe a handful of people showed up to the first rehearsal. Over time, the band has grown. It’s not clear exactly how many members the band currently has. But on a typical night, 15 people show up. Most bandmembers have other jobs. Some live in Ventura and Oxnard. If someone can’t make it, then somebody else fills in.

Maria and Antoine were there from the beginning — the yin and the yang, “the head and the heart” — of a high-energy musical experiment that is as much a family as a band.

Like many great discoveries, I happened onto the Brasscals by accident. It was at last year’s I Madonnari as I was making my way through the clutter of humanity waiting in food lines. First, I heard the sound. Then I looked up and saw a tall flute player, then a white-haired banjo player, then a trombone player with flashing eyes, and then a woman banging away with her mallets on a big bass drum. There was a stage, but they were not on it. Instead, they were shuffling, dancing, vamping, slithering their way through the crowd. Who were these people? 

This wasn’t a band so much as a parade. They were goofy; they were sexy; their sound was maybe a touch ragged around the edges, but they could most definitely play. And you, most definitely, could not look away. Dressed in what I would later learn was their signature black and red attire, these musicians looked like refugees from some pizza-parlor jazz band. 

They were playing a wildly eclectic mix of anything they could cram in their musical blender and set on “frappe.” Each song was a surprise. There was Duke Ellington. The minor-keyed schmaltz of klezmer. A ton of funk. Even Santa Barbara’s hometown girl Katy Perry made the playlist. 

Wow, I thought. Signs of intelligent life. Right here on Planet Earth.

It took me a while to get the band’s name right. For the record, it’s the Brasscals, a distilled blend of “the Rascals” and “the Brassholes.” Names that had first been considered. 

The next time I saw the Brasscals was December 10 at the Night Lizard beer emporium on State Street. For me, this location is packed with sentimental significance. It’s where the Independent first opened its offices. Back then, it was an earthquake trap, crawling with rats. But it was a great place. It’s where I met my wife. And where the Independent held a block party when Bill Clinton got elected. Imagine that. There was much dancing in the streets that night. I have the photographs to prove it.

Today, the owner of the Night Lizard — not to mention merchants and businesspeople up and down State Street, and all the folks at City Hall — is desperately trying to figure out what to do with the street, let alone how to get people dancing in them.

I’d like to make a suggestion: street-brass bands like the Brasscals.

Their sound is part of an emerging tradition known as honk music, now about 20 years old. It’s a fusion of the second-line marching band tradition of New Orleans jazz funeral processions with the political protest marching bands that emerged in opposition to the United States’ declaration of war against Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. Such bands — with outlandishly convoluted and subversively fun names such as “the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band” — mobilized in those early days to help generate crowds of protesters.

Since then, the political thrust behind many honk bands has waned. Many have embraced a more generalized, community-centric focus. For the Brasscals, politics is the subject of an ongoing discussion. Some members, like Maria, come out of the left of center, queer tradition. But the band also includes conservatives, and people of all stripes in between. For the time being, personal affection, mutual respect, and the band’s profound collaborative chemistry take precedence over politics.

Over the past two years, the Brasscals have marched up State Street during Solstice, braving — in Maria’s words — “the pounding sun.” They’ve played Fourth of July, the Avocado Festival, numerous beer-garden gigs, bars, and more than a few weddings. Right now, they’re trying to get into public schools. Music should be learned by playing together, Maria insists, not in isolated, private music lessons, an approach she has put into practice throughout much of her teaching life. 

Playing in a honk band is a calling, not a profession. If lucky, a honk band makes the cost of gas, parking, and beer. The Brasscals have “amassed” a very modest travel kitty to help cover their costs for attending big urban honk festivals where they can jam with 40 other honk bands, as they did earlier this year in Seattle. Right now, they’re thinking of attending festivals in Austin, Texas, and in Somerville, Massachusetts, home of the first honk festival. But their big dream is Europe, and to play in the many honk festivals there. 

Honk bands are all about the street. Being on the street. Being at the same level as the audience. Honk is decidedly not about being up on a stage. Honk bands come on all shapes and sizes, but most rely on the jet propulsion provided by big, raucous brass instruments coupled with a choir of drums and percussion. Typically, honk bands do not have amplified instruments, though the Brasscals rely on tiny portable amps — ingeniously designed by their bass player Andrew “Jet Pack” Duncan for the bass and flute. And like folk and punk, it’s a grassroots celebration. 

Honk musicians do take solos, but unlike other musical styles, honk is a collective noise. Yes, it’s orchestrated and arranged, and skill matters. But in the world of honk, fun trumps virtuosity. Playfully outrageous in style and dress, honk bands are often frisky and risqué, in spite of the music’s more prudish left-wing political ancestry. Honk is not the band you bring to a party. Honk is the party. 

Before the show at the Night Lizard, the Brasscals went out onto State Street armed with their instruments to help rustle up a crowd. They carried a sign: “Follow us to the party.” Inside, the Brasscals took up much of the limited real estate. But what can you expect from a band featuring a tuba, a bass drum big enough to obscure the drummer’s head, a snare drum, four tenor drums, three tenor saxophones, a baritone sax, a trumpet, a trombone, a flute, an electric bass, a four-stringed tenor banjo, and, last but not least, a washboard?

Maria, with her battery-powered megaphone, calls out the tunes. To the extent there’s an on-site conductor, it’s her. “Maria conducts with her eyes,” several Brasscals explained. The bullhorn she carries with her during shows helps too.

The crowd was modest in size that night but massively appreciative. The Brasscals had brought along a couple of ringers — dressed in red and green apropos of the impending Christmas festivities — to get the dancing going. But a tableful of young dancers proved that hadn’t been necessary. They flung themselves about with barely restrained abandon and dance-school chops. I was envious. What comic book had I fallen into? 

The Brasscals went through their playlist, pumping out well-known songs such as “Watermelon Man,” “Tequila,” “Push It,” Duke Ellington’s “Caravan,” and the James Bond “007 Theme.” Their version of “Bésame Mucho,” one of the hammiest of all the Qué Lástima classics, started off with an amorphous blend of atmospheric horn voices, shifted briefly into a foot-dragging dirge, and escalated into a sultry, tango-like vamp hot enough to fog the windows. That’s when all the Brasscals began bellowing the lyrics. They had no mics. This gave a raw, soulful, howl-at-the-moon urgency to a song typically performed as the musical equivalent of canned Spam. 

I was grinning like a fool.

Maybe, I wondered, I had become unhinged. Maybe I was foisting onto some innocent band reason to believe that hope was not just another four-letter word. Just then, an old friend showed up, a music promoter who had worked in Santa Barbara for years. He’d never heard of the Brasscals. Presumably, his long-time experience allowed him to make a more dispassionate evaluation. I looked over. He too was grinning ear to ear. Another happy fool. 

Maybe we weren’t unhinged. 

The music stopped sometime before 11 p.m. When I stepped out onto State Street, there wasn’t a single pedestrian or bike rider in sight. Astonishingly, not for eight blocks. A cold nocturnal fog had settled low, and the canopy of clear white Christmas lights gave the scene an ethereal, movie-set glow. It felt wrong, somehow, to have this all to myself. But as I rode off with the Brasscals’ noisy joy bouncing around my brain, I felt so exhilarated it hurt. 

Two weeks ago, I attended a band rehearsal and a post-rehearsal band meeting. Both were held at La Casa de la Raza, which kindly donated the space. As a longtime reporter, I have covered enough government meetings to consider myself a connoisseur. The Brasscals meeting — at which they discussed future gigs, future festivals, what to do with limited travel funds, and the touchy topic of possible political actions — ranks as the single most constructive and collaborative “government” meeting I have ever attended. Everyone said their piece. Everyone’s peace was considered. Congress should take note. 

The rehearsal was even better. Maria, who normally conducts, could not attend, so Antoine — the research engineer, bike nut, and a veteran of no fewer than five street brass bands in France — stepped up. But so too did percussionist Kylie Muntean — a sound engineer who had moved to Santa Barbara nearly four years ago to work for Sonos — who clearly has conducting chops of her own. (To get to know the community, she initially worked odd jobs on weekends just to meet people.)

One player pushed to expand the drum solos by a few bars in “For Your Love,” the old Yardbirds classic. The band tried it out. Multiple times. Everyone expressed their opinions. The change didn’t make the cut. Throughout it all, there was much laughter and banter. When the Brasscals stubbed their toes on the intricate rhythmic patterns of “In Time VII” a tricky 7/4 time-change tip of the hat written by Maria to the Dave Brubeck music she grew up hearing as a girl in Los Angeles (and the band’s only original song to date), Kylie suggested everyone put down their instrument and try singing their parts instead. After a few repetitions, it all got hammered out. 

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‘They were sexy, they were goofy; their sound was maybe a touch raw around the edges, but they could most definitely play. And you — most definitely — could not look away.’ 

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All my life, I’ve had friends who have played music and played seriously. I’m familiar with the secondhand smoke emanating off of small bands. I’m familiar with the rigid dictatorships of big bands and orchestras. What most blows my mind about the Brasscals is how much everyone really likes each other; there’s a palpable sweetness. “It’s the best club you could want to belong to,” said bass player Andrew Duncan. As flute player Christine Dhein said, both jokingly and seriously, “We have a policy: No Brasscals left behind.” 

For Maria, it is diversity that gives the band its greatest strength. “Our membership includes the following: at least three or four senior citizens, someone from France, someone from Africa, someone with Parkinson’s, someone who is legally blind, at least one Muslim and one Jew, a diabetic, a trans person, a former Olympic water polo player,” she wrote in a recent email. “We have both a current UCSB professor, a former UCSB professor, as well as a former plumber, an author, a couple of techies, a sailor, many queers, and roughly as many women as men.” 

She could easily have also added: a couple of therapists, a physical trainer, a former Los Angeles County firefighter, a corporate PR specialist, a former disco roller-skater, two veteran street buskers, and many former bar-band musicians. The youngest member of the Brasscals, snare drummer Jesse MacDonald, is 20 years old. The oldest is 87 — Ralph Whitney, who plays washboards and is in charge of getting the crowds dancing. 

Many members, like Maria and Antoine, have been lifelong musicians. Trumpet player Mary Beugelsdijk, the daughter of Dutch tulip growers who moved to Kansas to grow wheat, was lead trumpet player — out of 90 trumpet players — in Notre Dame’s 450-member marching band. Many have moved to Santa Barbara in the past three years: some for jobs, others to be close to aging relatives, and some are COVID crisis refugees driven to find a desirable place to live. One musician, who had grown up here, returned only to find that most old friends had left town. Two accidentally stumbled on a Brasscals rehearsal in Alameda Park. They stopped to ask questions. “Go get your horns,” they were urged. “Go get them now.” When they returned, they were welcomed and put at ease. 

All were driven by an urgent need to incorporate music into their lives. All were driven by a strong need to find a creatively collaborative community. Or, to put it in the words of most members of the band, they were looking for fun. 

The only rules: No flakes. You have to show up. You also have to be able to march with your instrument, though the Brasscals take pains not to use the word “march.” Marching has connotations of militaristic precision totally at odds with the Brasscals’ fun-loving spirit of group individualism. “We parade,” said Antoine. “We don’t march.” 

The pathways by which individual Brasscals joined the band make for a collective origin story that would rival anything in the Avengers franchise movies. They’re all interesting. Perhaps the most striking involves Hilary Licht, who moved to Santa Barbara with her 8-year-old son three years ago after her husband, a musician and composer for TV shows such as Dexter, had died. At that time, Licht did not play a musical instrument. Her only musical experience was playing flute in 4th grade. But Licht said she needed to get music back into her life.

She showed up at a rehearsal equipped with her son’s toy hand drum, a djembe. Maria and Antoine were there, along with Christine on flute, Jessie on drums, Ralph on washboard, and Kylie on the tenor drums. “They couldn’t have been more inclusive, encouraging, and embracing,” she said. But her sound, they said, was just too small. They tried out a tom-tom drum. Also too small. By then, she was hooked. “What did I have to lose?” she said. She went online and ordered a big, marching-band-sized bass drum. It was too big. 

JT Whitney, the son of washboard player Ralph Whitney who makes hand-crafted wood drums, stepped up. He custom-made a bass drum to fit Licht’s size. Today, Licht pounds that drum with authority. As one of her bandmates said, “She knows how to slam the back door.”

Looking back, Licht recalled, “They just made room in this gigantic circle for me. Now I get to march around and create spontaneous parties out on the street.” 

The Brasscals will be playing on February 3 at The Tully, a bar located at 1431 San Andres Street on the Westside. And beginning next month, they will perform as the resident house band at the Night Lizard at 607 State Street. For anyone interested, the Brasscals are still looking for musical co-conspirators. See brasscals.weebly.com or contact brasscals@riseup.net.