Album Notes

Imagine a gaggle of trumpets, trombones, euphoniums (what the heck are they?), a tuba, bass, drums and piano in your face with rousing, stomping jazz rhythms, samba, African beats, Middle Eastern melodies, avant-garde funk, a touch of salsa, and....well, you get the idea. You've just discovered BRASS TACKS (as in "getting down to").

Amy Duncan is the creator of this madness...an American pianist, percussionist, writer and arranger who hails from Manhattan (where she first put BRASS TACKS together in 1984), and has lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for nine years where she put the band together with all Brazilian guys, born and bred (thus their penchant for playing killer sambas)and recorded "My Joy." Call it "Birth of the Cool" meets World Beat, if you will, BRASS TACKS dishes up a happy smorgasbord of international flavors.

Oh, and yeah, there really are two euphoniums in the band. In case you didn't know, they're the things that look like baby tubas that you usually see in Salvation Army bands. But you won't find any hymns in the BRASS TACKS repertoire. Amy's feisty compositions weave a tapestry whose warp is jazz, but whose woof extends all the way from Brazil to Ghana and back, via the U.S. and Cuba. One of the band's most requested numbers, "Roach Motel," tells the tale of how the little buggers take off on vacation but encounter an unpleasant surprise, and features a rap by the guys in the band, yep you guessed it: "They check in, but they don't check out!"

A couple of comments from fans:

"That first track had me believing that I was in Rio....during Carnival (or is it Carnaval?)....and practicing my samba with the throngs that mob the streets during that festival. On second thought, there probably isn't much demand for sedentary, bald, albino-like Norwegians so its perhaps best that I confine my fantasies to the living room."

"I LOVE your CD and am so impressed you could run off to South America and put together a re-creation of your New York band. I bet if you moved to Alaska you could get a bunch of Eskimos and polar bears together and do the same thing - or Hawaii and get dolphins and sea turtles to do it there."