bras

s. got you!

Hey, everyone! If you’re subscribed to this substack, it’s probably because you meant to subscribe to my other one after I directly asked you to but got unintentionally rerouted. No matter. Here are some really gorgeous brass arrangements I have been awing at recently.

Sorry Fahey - Haley Heynderickx

Of course, 90% of this is Haley Heynderickx being one of the most talented songwriters/singers/guitarists alive, and this song being a poignant tribute to John Fahey through its shared picking/hammer-on patterns with his classic tune Sligo River Blues — yet a lot of it is also the Westerlies’ haunting and always dynamically perfect arrangements. One nice thing about good music is that so many things can share being most of it.

Drinking Age - Cameron Winter

Somewhere buried in a heap of gleeful lies told by Cameron Winter in the NYT’s recent profile of him, the author describes the rehearsal for this performance — Cameron, a piano, and six middle aged woman brass players trying to suss out an arrangement for their t-minus 30 live television debut. This is recounted from my memory of the gift article, but apparently it was awkward, then stressful, then his boyish charm won everyone over and they sounded soooooo good.

LA QUE PUEDE, PUEDE - Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso

Horns less prevalent in this than the previous two (bummer), but still killer. Trumpet mute is used so well here. I’m seeing Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso live in July and am incredibly excited. When they play live concerts they usually don’t have a full horn setup (or at least as far as I’m aware), but they go all out with pyrotechnics and bizarre stage antics, so it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

_______45______ / Saal 1 - Bon Iver

I’m sort of cheating here, but not really. The saxophonist does take a solo, but that’s not the point. He does steal the stage, though. But it really isn’t why this is featured. The sound we’re so lucky to hear at the beginning is a result of Justin Vernon’s weird mysterious custom instrument that lets him sound like an angel.

back midi - Marlene Dietrich

This whole session is fantastic, but I think the horns get to shine the brightest on Marlene Dietrich, a song about a positively kick-ass lady of yore who was super gay. Especially the rum-pa-pa (or at least its implied nature) around 1:48. Really beautiful stuff, shout out to Lewis Evans who I once almost ran over in an Uber after seeing BC,NR at the Sinclair. I supposed it was my Uber driver who almost ran him over, but that just doesn’t feel right to say. Should we have hit and killed him, perhaps an instant flattening type of scenario, I certainly would have felt directly at fault.

dear prudence - the house

This just does not have horns in it at all. Who gives a shit? I usually think it’s lame to be like “wow I can’t believe so and so artist wrote so and so song that so and so artist covered” but it’s pretty fun to do with the Beatles, not in a Beatles-hating way at all, moreso like hey the Beatles released what, three hundred songs? And they were almost all good! They can stand to have some valor stolen. Alana Amore is absolutely incredible, which you can tell from watching this video, (which I’m sure you have), but it’s still worth being said. I saw them perform in a basement called The Pelvic Floor in my freshman year of college, followed by Mei Semones, because I was so lucky. Amore played a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World that moved my mind three inches to the left of my neck. Songwriting aside, Semones and Amore are both genius guitarists in their own right. It’s absurd!

That night, I thought to myself, wow, I can’t believe everyone act Boston music scene is this good. I will stay here forever. The next weekend, I went to a show where the headliner band covered Bennie and the Jets in the middle of their set, and then upon demand for an encore, professed that they had just played every single song they knew how to play as a band, so they played Bennie and the Jets again. We’ll always have Winkler.

thanks for reading!