King Cabbage Brass Band
August 5, 2023
Mercury Lounge
There’s a sign onstage at Mercury Lounge threatening anyone who performs more than three cover songs with removal. Like most rules, that doesn’t apply to Beyonce, and thus it doesn’t apply to King Cabbage Brass Band, who used a trinity of Beyonce songs to incite fervor from a devoted pack of dancers who started and stayed up front all night. Physics must not apply to KCBB either, because “Oklahoma’s only brass band,” as it describes itself, fit eight people onto the Merc’s minuscule stage, deeper than it is wide, mirroring the shoulder-to-shoulder, sold-out crowd that filled the room and spilled out onto the patio.
A King Cabbage show is a give and take. First, the band takes: They see you, and they expect energy from you. There are numerous aggressively encouraged call-and-responses in the set and, in a venue this small, plenty of both one-on-one banter and crowd commands.
“Get your ass on the ground!” demanded frontman and multi-instrumentalist Greg “Coach” Fallis just a few minutes into the set.
Much of the audience, for the record, promptly got low. And in trade, so did he.
What they give blends the joy of arena pop with the feeling of going to church. Thanks to the immense technical skill of every player onstage and their innate entertainer sensibilities — a vaudevillian je ne sais quoi you can’t learn in regular trumpet lessons or whatever — there’s a forehead-smacking novelty to KCBB’s entire approach that makes you wonder why nobody was doing this around here sooner.
King Cabbage succeeds in what makes the New Orleans-style brass band formula so loved: creating a micro-community in real time with a heady dose of serotonin. The format of the New Orleans brass band, originated by the African-American and Afro-Creole populations of New Orleans and owing to African musical and ceremonial traditions, is designed for communal spaces: church, clubs, weddings, funerals or even walking down the street. (King Cabbage Brass Band is available for hire for all of those things.) And in an ode to NOLA brass bands’ second line parades, the band even trotted around the Mercury Lounge to begin the second set, pausing to play marching instruments while interspersed with the patio crowd.
Quibbles? Few. Maybe setlist order, because the energy of the less-devoted attendees did wane as the night went on. If there’s a better way for a brass band to end a performance than the frontman hoisting a tip jar through the crowd while the band plays “When the Saints Go Marching In,” I don’t know what it is, and they used this pretty early in the night.
Several of the evening’s most memorable moments (outside of the instantaneous excitement during the first few notes of “Crazy in Love”) resulted from KCBB’s clear-eyed, deadpan humor. There is nowhere else a concertgoer can see a trombone player twerk as the segue between the waning notes of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” and the opening of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” There is no other group touting its original songwriting — the band played a handful of originals and original brass arrangements throughout a set of mostly familiar tunes — and chanting “Tuba backwards is a‑but!” in the same earnest breath.
King Cabbage Brass Band will release a new single September 1 from its forthcoming album and has a headlining show at Cain’s Ballroom September 29. Recommended if you like fun.
Next from Becky: Honky Tonk Happy Hour with Jacob Tovar at Fassler Hall.
Next at Mercury Lounge: Joey Frendo & Noah Fowler.
