{"id":1671,"date":"2014-07-27T13:04:59","date_gmt":"2014-07-27T17:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/?p=1671"},"modified":"2019-09-12T15:49:29","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T19:49:29","slug":"hypnotic-brass-on-tour-clan-dad-cohran-in-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2014\/07\/hypnotic-brass-on-tour-clan-dad-cohran-in-chicago.html","title":{"rendered":"Hypnotic Brass on tour, clan-dad Cohran in Chicago"},"content":{"rendered":"

While Hypnotic Brass Ensemble<\/a>, comprising eight sons of jazz-beyond-jazz seer Kelan Phil Cohran<\/a>, was tearing it up in the midst of its\u00c2\u00a0Bad Boys of Jazz tour<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0at the\u00c2\u00a0Enclave de Agua African American Music Festival<\/a> in Soria, Spain, the patriarch himself held\u00c2\u00a0forth nearer home\u00c2\u00a0at the Garfield Conservatory, on the first of four free Neighborhood Nights<\/a> concerts presented this month by the Jazz Institute of Chicago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"facebook\/jazzphoto\"<\/a>

Phil Cohran photo by John Broughton<\/p><\/div>\n

The elder Cohran, an early member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and original co-founder
\n<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(though soon\u00c2\u00a0ex<\/em>-member) of the 49-year-old Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM<\/a>), announced “I am 87 today — I mean, I was 87 yesterday, too.” He recited late-19th century\u00c2\u00a0dialect poems by\u00c2\u00a0Paul Lawrence Dunbar<\/a>, aptly\u00c2\u00a0identifiying them as\u00c2\u00a0proto-rap. He played harp, a note or two on trumpet and several solos on electric kalimba, the instrument he concocted and calls the frankiphone, popularized by his one-time sideman<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0Maurice White on classic tunes<\/a> by Earth, Wind and Fire.<\/p>\n

Cohran was supported throughout his\u00c2\u00a0modal vamps and a rudimentary version of Ellington’s “C-Jam Blues” by his sons Tycho and Malik on tuba and Korg X50 electric keyboard, singer Phanta Celah and singer\/dancer Afrika Brown (daughter of the late, great Oscar Brown Jr.<\/a>). \u00c2\u00a0The\u00c2\u00a0music had a homemade, self-taught vibe,\u00c2\u00a0demonstrating\u00c2\u00a0higher aspirations\u00c2\u00a0than aesthetic realization. But in this case,\u00c2\u00a0Cohran’s\u00c2\u00a0messages were more important than their aesthetics. \u00c2\u00a0He\u00c2\u00a0spoke of enormous cultural shifts he’s observed since growing up in the 1930s, saying his aim is always to offer audiences “quality,” and speculated that “since the weather has gotten so extreme, maybe we’ll become more serious about music again.” As everyone who performs in Chicago now\u00c2\u00a0ought to, he made a point of dismay over the city’s deadly gun problem, acknowledging\u00c2\u00a0that there’s been\u00c2\u00a0no effective answer\u00c2\u00a0to the culture of violence, and offered\u00c2\u00a0lyrics that asserted\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0“got to get myself away from here” and “gotta get myself back on track.”<\/p>\n

The huge greenhouse dating from 1884\u00c2\u00a0in which the concert\u00c2\u00a0was set was a bubble of calm within the relative wilds of Garfield Park on Chicago’s still-desolate West Side. A friend described the surrounding streets as “rowdy,” a way of warning, “Don’t go there.” The night before, a young teenage\u00c2\u00a0boy was murdered\u00c2\u00a0and six\u00c2\u00a0other people\u00c2\u00a0wounded during a gang-related drive-by shooting<\/a>. At 8:45 pm, about an hour after the performance ended, a man talking to a girl at a gas station on the far edge of the park was shot during an attempted robbery<\/a>. The Chicago Sun-Times “Shooting Tracker”<\/a> noted 13 incidents\u00c2\u00a0between 6 pm Friday 7\/25 and 4 am Sunday 7\/27. Of course that’s a huge improvement over the 11 dead, 60 wounded over the July 4 weekend three weeks ago.\u00c2\u00a0It’s not like nobody’s trying to address the issues. Over that recent\u00c2\u00a0national holiday, Police Supt. Garry McCarthy assigned hundreds of extra officers<\/a> to patrol the city. It might have been worse without them.<\/p>\n

After Phil Cohran’s concert mi corazon<\/em> and I ate\u00c2\u00a0supper with three of my closest, oldest friends and multi-reedist\/AACM stalwart\/University of Chicago improvisational music\u00c2\u00a0instructor\u00c2\u00a0Mwata Bowden<\/a>. We went one block from the Conservatory, to\u00c2\u00a0Inspiration Kitchens<\/a>, a community service-non-profit that trains homeless people in food-industry skills, offering tuition subsidies, job placement, “retention skills” and employing them (also at a caf\u00c3\u00a9<\/a> in the Uptown neighborhood). Among us we sampled\u00c2\u00a0corn bisque, fresh green bean salad, shrimp over cheese grits, crab cakes, buttermilk fried Cornish hen and a house-special dessert of deep chocolate flourless cake over carmel sauce with brittle and a scoop of ice-cream. Highly civilized environs and delicious fare amidst a\u00c2\u00a0site of repeated tragedies.\u00c2\u00a0Solutions exist, but don’t come easy. Complications\u00c2\u00a0persist.<\/p>\n

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While Hypnotic Brass Ensemble was tearing it up in the midst of its Bad Boys of Jazz tour in Soria, Spain, the eight brothers’ patriarch held forth on the first of four free Neighborhood Nights concerts presented by the Jazz Institute of Chicago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-main","8":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/Phil_Cohran-small.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1i3CL-qX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2285,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2017\/08\/war-for-laughs-marx-brothers-strangelove-chaplin-lehrer.html","url_meta":{"origin":1671,"position":0},"title":"War for laughs: Marx Brothers, Strangelove, Chaplin, Lehrer","author":"Howard Mandel","date":"August 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"My father taught me at age 8 to trust the Marx Brothers' for trenchant social commentary.\u00c2\u00a0Here's Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo in Duck Soup. 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The real signs of Chicago's jazz depth and diversity are evident in the unique \"club tour\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "main"","block_context":{"text":"main","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/category\/main"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2299,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2017\/09\/chicago-jazz-fest-expanded-review-deutsch-photos.html","url_meta":{"origin":1671,"position":4},"title":"Chicago Jazz Fest expanded review & Deutsch photos","author":"Howard Mandel","date":"September 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"My DownBeat review of the 39th annual\u00c2\u00a0Chicago Jazz Festival held over Labor Day weekend in and spilling out of Millennium Park, highlights the best I heard -- including the specially\u00c2\u00a0organized\u00c2\u00a0big band led by trumpeter Jon Faddis, making big fun\u00c2\u00a0from his mentor Dizzy Gillespie's fresh-as-fire arrangements dating 60 to 70 years\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Antonio Hart\"","block_context":{"text":"Antonio Hart","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/tag\/antonio-hart"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/21427448_10154723372000925_592689889155703020_o.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/21427448_10154723372000925_592689889155703020_o.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/21427448_10154723372000925_592689889155703020_o.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/21427448_10154723372000925_592689889155703020_o.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/21427448_10154723372000925_592689889155703020_o.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2334,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2017\/09\/jazz-community-upends-englewoods-bad-rep.html","url_meta":{"origin":1671,"position":5},"title":"Jazz community upends Englewood’s bad rep","author":"Howard Mandel","date":"September 20, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The 18th annual free Englewood Jazz Festival in south side Hamilton Park last\u00c2\u00a0Saturday (9\/16) affirmed the best of\u00c2\u00a0Chicago's grassroots\u00c2\u00a0culture, promoting an opposite image of this challenged neighborhood as a dangerous place -- unless one fears powerful, creative music that speaks as directly as dance rhythms to its family of\u00c2\u00a0listeners. 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