The Return of the Kashmere Stage band

They closed with the swinging, double-time funk/rock/soul hybrid "All Praises," with Santana-esque guitar solos, a flash of "Eleanor Rigby" and Middleton's demonstration of "circular breathing," which he said he learned from Grover Washington Jr. The saxophonist held one note for an impossibly long interval — several minutes at least — as conductor Craig Baldwin cavorted about the stage, the other horns rocked their instruments back and forth in time to the beat and the crowd, students included, went absolutely apeshit. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything.

When the ensuing standing ovation died down, finally, principal Parker recognized Conrad Johnson, sitting front row center, and the ovation started right back up again. The tiny, exceedingly frail gentleman, who had been wheeled into the auditorium earlier as L.A. filmmaker Mark Landsman's camera crew rolled away, was helped to his feet and managed to address the crowd.

"All I can say is... thank you," he rasped. "We appreciate the fact you like our music."

Barely 48 hours later, as most of the country's attention was focused on the Super Bowl, Conrad O. "Prof" Johnson passed away. He was 92 years old, and his music was still affecting young lives.

"I ain't really interested in that kind of music. They had some uptempo stuff, but I like music you can really dance to," said KHS senior and Chamillionaire fan Horace Harris after Friday's performance. "But it was a good show."

Freshman Bernardo Resendez agreed, to an even greater degree. A Lil Wayne fan, he admitted he also hadn't given jazz and funk much thought before Friday.

"But," Resendez added, "I'm going to start." — C.G.
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Since the demise of the Soul Rebels Brass Band's packed Monday-night shows at Almeda Boulevard joint the Libra Lounge, the New Orleans/Houston brass-band scene has been fairly quiet. (Or at least hard for Racket to find.) That changed Saturday, when Bohemeo's hosted a Mardi Gras weekend party starring the Voodoo Brass Band, a group I had not heard of.

What's exciting to me about the VBB is that they proudly claim Houston (and Houston alone) as home on their MySpace; that was not the case with the New Birth nor the Soul Rebels, both of whom claimed the Big Easy wholly or in part as home.

The show was hosted by the Surviving Katrina and Rita Project, the hugely ambitious ongoing oral history project in which the people victimized in that surreal summer document their own histories. Folklorist Pat Jasper is one of the project's planners, and she booked the VBB at this show.

Before they took the stage, she confessed that she didn't really know what to expect. "Brass bands are like mariachis — you never know who is going to play at any given show," she said. "They are event-based groups."

When the band took the stage at Bohemeo's, I only recognized Soul Rebels tuba man Damion Francois — a thirtysomething guy who looks like a relative of Bun B. Francois was accompanied by a bass drummer who looked to be in his thirties, as well as two trumpeters, a snare drummer and a trombonist who appeared to range in age from 13 to 20. I was told that at least one of them was enrolled at TSU, also the alma mater of the Soul Rebels drummer/leader Lumar ­LeBlanc.

Tentative at first, the band hit its stride when the rhythm section launched into the rollin' beat to "They Don't Know," the Soul Rebels' graceful and magnificent instrumental from their 2005 album Rebelution. By the end of the tune, everybody in the little coffee shop was clapping to the beat and stomping their feet.

Jelly Roll Morton once said that for jazz to be jazz it must have what he called "the Spanish tinge, " and "They Don't Know" has that, even more literally than Morton meant. Morton was using "Spanish" as a catch-all term for music from Latin America, but the textured horns and amazing crescendo of "They Don't Know" remind me of the utterly dramatic music you hear amid the bloody grandeur and glittering spectacle of a plaza de toros in Madrid.

But we weren't in a Castilian plaza de toros, we were in Telephone Road's Plaza Tlaquepaque. A couple of weeks ago, I wondered in this space about what form Houston's next signature sound might take. Could this be a hint? You have to think that Houston's one of the only places on Earth where you can hear New Orleans brass band music in a coffeehouse with a Spanish name across from a Thai restaurant in a plaza named after a Nahuatl-speaking Mexican saint.

Former Los Skarnales bassist Nick Gaitan, whose new genre-melding group Umbrella Man followed the VBB on the stage, is already soaking up the influence. "I am thinking of adding another drummer to play with Beans [Wheeler] in my band," he told me. "I really love the rhythms these brass bands jam." — J.N.L.

john.lomax@houstonpress.com

chris.gray@houstonpress.com