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The St. Louis Brass Band. Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
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If you’ve been to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis to see “Jeremy Deller: Joy in People,” which opened February 1, there is a performance in the museum this month that is fairly crucial to understanding the whole show. “Acid Brass” was a 1997 collaboration between Deller and the Williams Fairey Brass Band, who arranged—and performed, in proper configuration and in full uniform—what Deller described as “acid house anthems,” including A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray”; Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Strings of Life”; and 808 State’s “Pacific 202.”
In a 2010 interview with Robert Eikmeyer and Alistair Hudson, Deller explained that it was during this alchemical process of collaboration with the the brass band that he finally understood he could make art “with people,” without having to “make something at the end of it that you could hold or buy.” And though there was a CD at the end of the process, he says that wasn’t the point. “It was a byproduct,” he says. “You could make an experience—or a piece of music that would exist in the world—and didn’t have to make prints or bang things up on a wall, which I didn’t really like. So that liberated me, working with that brass band…and it was for them, too, because they finally got to play for people their own age, people in their twenties, and play at music festivals and get mobbed at the end and have groupies, almost.” (The band is still playing acid house music—it performs regularly and just released a new CD last year.)
On the phone from London, Deller says traditional English brass bands were formed to get 19th-century factory workers interested in and playing music; he saw parallels in the underground culture of house music (he mapped out the connections in the diagrammatic 1997 wall painting The History of the World). “It’s just a musical portrait of a project, in a sense, but it also has some cultural connections and political connections,” he says. “So it’s just a way to connect these two musical moments.”
The piece has never been performed in the U.S., and luckily, St. Louis has a crackerjack ensemble, the St. Louis Brass Band, that agreed to play “Acid Brass” at the Contemporary. John Israel, president of SLBB’s board of directors (he’s also first tenor trombone), says that when the museum approached the band about performing the piece, his first thought was just that there was just going to be “a lot of time on the horn, a lot of building up the players’ chops so they can get through 30 minutes of all these technical rhythms.
“But the whole background of the English brass band is, it’s a competing type of group,” he continues. “So there is a lot of literature that is written, what we call ‘test pieces’—you’re judged on how well you play those. There are lyrical parts, and there are rhythmical parts, and some of these are 10 or 15 minutes long. So the biggest adjustment was just the style of music—riffs that happen over and over and are kind of layered.”
And through the “translation” from house to brass band was a fait accompli, Israel says there was a little bit of musical and cultural microtranslation that had to be worked through with Rodney Newton, who did the original arrangements for the Williams Fairey Brass Band. “He asked us all kinds of questions, like, ‘Does the band read traditional brass-band music?’ Because there are different clefs you use,” Israel says. Also, SLBB usually performs in tuxes, rather than in band uniforms trimmed with braid. “We do have some traditional English brass-band jackets, but we need to get more. They kind of look like doorman’s jackets, the ones we have,” he says, laughing, “but it is a tradition.”
Jeremy Deller’s “Acid Brass” will be performed Thursday, March 14, at 7 p.m. Admission is $10, free for Contemporary members. “Jeremy Deller: Joy in People” runs through April 28; for more with Deller, visit stlmag.com. For more information, call 314-535-4660 or visit camstl.org or stlbb.org.
