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.