Brass menagerie

>> Drums & Tuba take marching orders from nobody

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

While it may have been a fancy for New Orleans brass bands that led then-Texan tuba-tooter Brian Wolff to his bassy beast around 1995, that singular connection didn’t last long. “I don’t know what I was really thinking,” says Wolff. “I just liked the instrument. I wasn’t really thinking about what kind of music I was gonna play on it—just pretty much anything and everything.”

Initially, he and shit-hot drummer Tony Nozero were busking on Austin sidewalks, and their self-appointed tag Drums & Tuba meant simply that. “It was a stripped-down, second-line kind of thing, doing Meters covers and shit. Eventually, we started branching off and doing our own weird stuff.”

Weird is right, just add cool, intense and totally original to the list. After guitarist Neal McKeeby signed on to work double axe duty, delay pedals and such came into play, and not just for the guitars. “We played a show, four or five years ago, with Spaceheads from England. Up until that point, I’d never seen a horn player use effects that made sense to me. I used to think you could do everything acoustically—I was pretty anti-technology. Seeing someone use it in a way that made sense, that just blew me away.”

By the release of their last album, Vinyl Killer, last year on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label, D&T had relegated the Big Easy brass sound to a mere corner of their musical mix-up, alongside krautrock, psych-jazz, surf punk and God knows what all else. The results are furiously fun, honest, intricate—and impossible to define.

“That’s a battle we’ve fought for a long time. You show up in a town and the first thing people want to know is, what do you sound like? I really have not been able to come up with a quick answer for that. Sometimes I just say rock ’n’ roll. It can be a problem, because people want to hear music that’s familiar. On the other hand, at this point, there’s not that much stuff that people haven’t heard before. Even if the music world doesn’t realize it, people are a little desperate to hear something that isn’t just a rehash. Also, we have an advantage in that people have low expectations—‘Drums and tuba? That’ll suck!’” :

At le Swimming on Sunday, May 26, 10pm, $6