Fat Tuesday is next week with a free all-ages Mardi Gras festival in the Fillmore and performances by Mission Delirium and New Orleans' Rebirth Brass Band in the Mission. SFist takes a closer look at a few local brass bands that have influenced the scene through the years.
Fillmore Street will be the main place to be on Fat Tuesday with the district’s 18th annual Mardi Gras celebration, featuring a New Orleans-style processional led by the David Hardiman Line Band, followed by a free community blues concert with the popular Curtis Family Notes and Niecy Living Single.
David Hardiman's history in the Bay Area music scene spans decades. Hardiman played with the Golden Gate Park Band for 20 years starting in the mid-'70s, partially in an effort to provide some much-needed Black representation to the band. Around the same time, Hardiman also founded his ongoing project, the San Francisco All-Star Big Band, which features musicians who played with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, among other legends.
Yesterday, SFist noted that the Brass Liberation Orchestra (BLO) showed up to last Saturday's protest at the Tesla showroom, where they added some extra oomph to chants such as, "People over profit, stop the coup!" and generally elevated the camaraderie of the event.
BLO has been serving as a political protest band since the early 2000s starting with anti-Iraq War protests, followed by the Occupy movement and later the Muslim ban protests at SFO.
SFist filmed video of BLO at one of the SFO protests back in 2017 where they considerably boosted morale:
Members of the BLO also perform with the group Mission Delirium (among many others), who are performing at Curio in the Mission on Tuesday night. The Rebirth Brass Band will be performing at the Chapel later in the evening.
The 2017 airport protest wasn’t the only time this author randomly caught some impromptu brass band action.
In October of 2023, on a dark, dark night at Warm Water Cove in the Dogpatch, several people holding instruments briefly emerged from the shadows before receding back into the dark and launching into a stellar performance, prompting us to dance to what felt like imaginary musicians:
The very first time SFist caught a brass band performance on video was at Cellspace in 2001 when Extra Action Marching Band took over the space and had us in awe. Members of Extra Action can reportedly be found performing with Brass Liberation Orchestra and Mission Delirium these days:
Image: David Hardiman's website
