Description

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The Stooges Brass Band always had big dreams. From playing in the streets of New Orleans in the mid-1990s to playing stages the world over, they have held fast to their goal of raising brass band music and musicians to new heights--professionally and musically. In the intervening years, the band's members have become family, courted controversy, and trained a new generation of musicians, becoming one of the city's top brass bands along the way. Two decades after their founding, they have decided to tell their story.

Can't Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it's as much a personal account of the Stooges' careers as it is a story of the city's musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale about black men in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.

DeCoste and the band members take readers into the barrooms, practice rooms, studios, tour vans, and streets where the music is made and brotherhoods are shaped and strengthened. Comprised of lively firsthand accounts and honest dialogue, Can't Be Faded is a dynamic approach to collaborative research that offers a sensitive portrait of the humans behind the horns.

About the Author

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The Stooges Brass Band is one of the hardest-working brass bands in New Orleans. Founded in 1996, their discography includes It's About Time (2003), Street Music (2013), and Thursday Night House Party (2016). Kyle DeCoste is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. For his role as coauthor of Can't Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game, he was awarded the 2021 Zora Neale Hurston Prize by the American Folklore Society. His articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.