A Few Minutes With No BS! Brass Band

Based in Richmond, Va., No BS! isn’t what you might think of as your typical brass band. One topic that came up during the Q&A was how Richmond has influenced the 12-piece band’s sound, which features a funky mix of jazz, hip hop and rock grooves. The group is made up of trombonists Pace, Bryan Hooten, John Hulley, Reggie Chapman and Dillard Watt; trumpeters Sam Koff, Marcus Tenney, Taylor Barnett, Rob Quallich; saxophonist David Hood; tuba player Stefan Demetriadis; and drummer Lance Koehler

We also discussed how the Baltimore protests and Freddie Gray’s death affected Pace as well as the new album, Brass Knuckles. The cover art of the LP is an impressionist painting of a scene from the protests that broke out in the streets earlier this year.   

Although No BS! covers heavy topics on its new album, including police brutality and the struggle for equality, the group’s live show is far from somber.

“We ain’t trying to depress anybody,” Pace says. “The world is already doing that.” Instead, the No BS! Band wants to offer the chance for music fans from all demographics to join together and just have a good time for a few hours.  

“You provide the crowd, man, and we’re going to rock it!”

You formed the band in 2006. Has there been a pretty consistent lineup since then?

The core of the group, about half of the band, has been a part of the group since 2006. As everyone’s lives change or go on to different things or whatever, people have come in and out of the group but the core has been there for almost nine years.

The band’s bio says almost every member has conservatory training. What’s your background in music?

I grew up singing in the church choir and then doing band all throughout high school and falling in love with band and hip hop and all that stuff around those ages. And then I went to school for music education at VCU and met some of the guys there and essentially met everybody when I came to Richmond to go to college. A couple of the guys in the band are professors at VCU, adjuncts, one guy’s got his doctorate, one guy’s about to finish his doctorate. One guy’s got his masters, just got a good private school job. …. Education is a big thing for the band.

The group is still based in Richmond, Va. How has the city influenced your sound?

Richmond is a town that is on the upswing, having such a really complicated history being the capital of the South, [plus] all of the arts and punk rock and rock ’n’ roll and just those type of things have such a big voice in the city … [there’s] such a diverse type of people around. It’s kind of like a small town but in a big package. The musician network is kind of close knit. … The energy of that and the energy of trying to make things a very DIY-culture town and very small business-oriented definitely influenced our sound. And just being a place where it’s not too far from New York and it’s not too far from D.C. and creative people can [afford to] live here. … I think it’s just a really great location and the vibe of the city is just very encompassing in that way and the arts community is very cohesive. We don’t have a chip on our shoulder, we’re all doing our thing in a way in which we think [Richmond’s] as good as any other big city, trying to make Richmond have the same name [recognition] as like a Seattle or an Austin or a Brooklyn.

You mentioned the diversity in the city. It sounds like the group reflects that, with members from different backgrounds, religions and cultures.  

Exactly.  That’s a big thing, at least to me. It’s really important that we all have very different growing-up experiences and political ideologies and economic backgrounds and all of those things are all over the place in the band. We have a guy who’s 40, a guy who’s 25, we have students and we also have professors. We have full-time musicians, a business owner, one guy owns his own studio, one guy’s a financial analyst. And then we all come together to make this thing we’re all proud of together. There’s something to be said about that, especially something to be said about keeping something together for such a long time. I think it’s making our music … feel really inviting to everybody. On stage we don’t wear uniforms or anything. Some guys are in suits and some guys are just dressed more for more rock. And it feels welcoming, I think, to the audience to know that all people are welcome at our shows, all types. Our shows kind of look like that, which is my favorite thing about the band right now. There’s high school kids and band kids, crunkers, older people, NPR types because we’ve done the “Tiny Desk Concert” and the Opera House, the people that live around the area, old-money type people that come to our shows and everyone’s partying together and that’s like, that’s the dream. That’s the message we’re trying to spread all over the world – everybody getting together and … it’s like that utopia in which we’re all just going to be together for those few hours and not worry about how dark things can get or how divisive people can get over issues that plague our society and whatnot. We try to be like a breath of fresh air for those things, but acknowledging the situations in the music.

Question about the band’s name – what are some of the BS behaviors or attitudes you’ve witnessed in the music industry?

Laziness, lack of creativity … fakeness, just non-authenticity are the things that we try to stay away from in general. The band is the band, it looks the way it looks, it sounds the way it sounds. And we made all of those decisions in finding our way in that way. We’re not trying to copy anybody. I think that’s why No BS gets embraced by all of the New Orleans brass bands and all the other kind of brass bands because we don’t sound like them and we don’t attempt [to]. The New Orleans’ brass band tradition is so deep that to me, it just seemed like such a waste, almost insulting, to try and pretend to do what they do, to try and sound like them and be a copied version of that. So, like you asked in an earlier question, how does the city influence [our sound], there’s a really rockin’ energetic esthetic mark to the town and the music around here and it’s also infused with there being such a great jazz school nearby and there being a big jazz scene in the town. Richmond was one of the stops that Duke Ellington and all the greats always stopped in Richmond. … We have a bunch of historical theaters where Dizzy Gillespie played and all that, so that’s kind of infused in all that too. Along with the art rock scene, bands like Gwar and stuff like that, and then there’s the heavy metal scene, bands like Lamb Of God and then there’s pop … We want it to sound like we came from this place but using that instrumentation as a nod to the greats. I think that’s the big thing – creating your own voice and having your own style as best you can.   

The cover art from your new album, Brass Knuckles, depicts the protests earlier this year in Baltimore. How did you end up choosing this as your cover art?

All of the artwork [for] our albums is … done by the same painter. His name is Nick Kuszyk. He’s from Richmond but he lives in New York now. As his art has progressed throughout the years, he’s just our guy. He did all of our records and this was the place he was coming from. He had this painting and Lance showed it to me and it was instantly what we thought was perfect for right now. Iconic. … When people like us are really old, when they [remember] a picture from back in the past, that is going to be one of them because it kind of started this conversation about police brutality that’s still going on and it hasn’t been solved. But [the painting’s] done like a Monet or something, a pointillist [style]. To me, it’s so beautiful. It just seems like such a powerful piece of art and so right on time that it was a no brainer that that was the painting we were going to use. I don’t think Lance asked him to paint that but I think they just talked about how they were feeling and thinking and that’s what he made.

I was wondering if you gave the painter direction or if he just came up with that.

We all just work together. It’s his art and our art and we try to find somewhere in the middle and pick something that felt good. … All of the artists in the world are drawing from the same [subject], that is this world around us. … Everyone’s just coming from the same place, at the same time. You know, like Kendrick Lamar’s record and all of the records that are like it at the moment. It just is pop culture at the moment. … Everybody is talking about what’s up with the cops … regardless of what side of the situation you fall. You know, it’s just a lot of murder. So maybe we should talk about it in some kind of way, to figure it out. I think [the album art] was just really natural in that way. We didn’t go out of our way to make it seem like we were trying to put a political thing on the record. Not even political, putting something controversial on the record. It just is the time. It is happening. It’s not like a ploy. I think [the cover art] fits our music really great. Nick is such a talented painter. He has all kind of works all over the place. And it fits so well because it’s like our whole thing is trying to be that beauty within all of the chaos. For a couple hours you can spend time with us and forget about that. And that painting is just making something really ugly beautiful. I just loved it. Lance gets the credit for finding that.

How did the Baltimore protests and Freddie Gray’s death affect you?

Yeah, it affected me personally, you know, just being a black person. Police officers are just scary to me. The same feeling that if you’re a non-minority, you know if you’re a white woman or a white man just walking alone late at night and you see a weird person coming around or whatever, the feeling that you get of just feeling unsafe is the feeling that I get if I’m walking alone and there’s a cop coming around. I could be a powerless situation at any moment and just hope to God that somebody’s got their cellphone out.

That’s very new that a cellphone could save you from something terrible. … There’s all kind of stuff that gets real dark about that. It really does affect the day-to-day. It’s not just like an idea on Facebook or out in the ether. It’s an actual feeling of un-safeness. Even if you’re driving a car. Everyone has a feeling, if you’re driving a car and a cop car pulls up behind you and is just riding behind you, you’re like, “Oh, snap! Did I do something? Are my stickers good?” or whatever. But just like imagine that feeling, like forever. (laughs) You know what I mean? (laughs) Like forever. It’s definitely affecting. And music and art are the things that make me feel OK about some of that stuff. … We just have problems that we need to solve. That’s just all there is to it. 

It seems like this stuff has been going on for a really long time but social media is shining a light on these injustices. I think it’s good to be having these conversations.

I think so too.

Hopefully things will start changing in a better direction.

Oh yeah, it’s already changing in a better direction. You can see the people that are resistant to that and that’s the thing that we have to fix. Who is resistant to change? Why would anyone tell you not to like someone else? What angle is that? Any of that kind of stuff is just like starting to be like the emperor has no clothes on. … And now we can get to a place in which we can start questioning some of our institutions to see if we can evolve them, go forward. Let’s get to the future, let’s get to a better place.

Do you have any personal favorite tracks from the new album?

“3 am Bounce,” I wrote that, so of course I love that. Me and my friends would get into deep, deep conversations about all this kind of shit all the time. And it’s just like around 3 a.m. when everyone feels safe, I guess, and thinks they’re super smart. … And then eventually it’s like, “Nah, let’s not talk about this anymore. Let’s just bounce.” It’s just like, “You know, man, you’re right, I’m right. Let’s go hang out.”(laughs) Can’t be mad all the time. You know what I mean?

I love all of [the tracks]. “Brass Knuckles” is great. “Act Like You Know,” [trombonist] Bryan Hooten killed it on that. And “What Now.” I think the last tune on the record is really beautiful, “I-40W,” which Marcus [Tenney] wrote. All of these tunes are great. … It’s the new one so, to me, I think it’s the best one. The songs all sound different. They’re kind of reflecting how different everybody is and the songwriting process. I really like it. I like the record as a whole. 

Being a 12-piece band, how does the songwriting process work?

Throughout the years it’s evolved. Went through a phase where we were jamming and making things that way. We went through a phase where guys were coming with songs already done, that we would kind of adapt to fit the sound of the band. And then there’s times where guys would come with songs half done and we’d make them up at rehearsal. So it’s all over the place. … We have guys that hadn’t written songs before, who wrote songs [on Brass Knuckles] so that’s great. Giving the band even more diversity of feel and sound. David Hood, our saxophone player, wrote a song called “Out Of Time” for one of his friends that passed. It’s a very different thing [from] the other songs on the record. I just think it’s great. The songwriting process is all over the place. Nine years in you just figure out all kinds of ways to keep it going. 

That’s neat to keep things interesting with different members contributing.

Yeah, totally. There were years when me and the drummer were writing all of the songs. And now that’s not the case – and it’s awesome.

The band has been praised for its live show. Earlier you discussed the diversity of the audience. What else can you tell readers about your live show?

It’s like you hear our records and you think, “Are they even doing this in real life?” And the answer is “Yes.” (laughs) We show up and we play hard. We come through with an attitude. We take the stage as if it’s time for a show. It’s old school. It’s not like, “Hey, do you like us?” It’s like, “Hey, we’re putting on a show. And you’re at it, already.” (laughs) We bring everybody in, tell them it’s OK to dance, it’s OK to talk – you’re at a party. I try to come and usher everybody into our spirit. We sell the [same] shirts that band members are wearing … so the crowd and the band have the same gear on and it’s just blurred. During set breaks we all hang out in the audience. We don’t hide in the green room. We try to be a part of the experience. And that’s what our live show is all about – a big, powerful thing that everyone can be involved with. 

There’s an awesome video of us at Joe’s Pub. It’s a good illustration of [our live show]. …We’re all out in the crowd and whatnot. So that’s what I think is the main thing – [It’s] powerful. fun, interactive, comfortable. A party.

What do you hope listeners take away from the album?

I hope it sounds like something they’ve never heard before and they come see us, man! Come see us play. And tell us what cities we need to go to because we want to come to your city.  Seeing the world is my favorite thing about being an artist altogether. Seeing different parts of the country, and seeing different parts of the world, going to Europe and seeing Australia. … Going to those places, every single time there’s a bunch of people who may or may not have ever seen us and we have to try to turn the crowd. It’s a really satisfying thing for me. I want everybody to come see us live.

Upcoming dates for No BS! Brass Band:

Nov. 19 – South Burlington, Vt., Higher Ground – Showcase Lounge        
Nov. 20 – Lake Placid, N.Y., Lake Placid Center For The Arts       
Nov. 21 – Hastings-On-Hudson, N.Y., The Purple Crayon  
Dec. 5 – Richmond, Va., The Broadberry

For more information please visit NoBSBrass.com.