ABSTRACT
Many bands connected with the HONK! movement have started as volunteer, amateur bands. Some, like Chicago’s Mucca Pazza and Portland’s MarchFourth Marching Band, have become successful touring bands, who are more likely to be found performing in commercial venues than parading in the streets. Prominent among the driving forces for the resurgence of alternative brass bands in the US were the radical street theatre projects of the 1960s. HONK!TX in Austin started in 2011 after HONK! regulars from the Minor Mishap Marching Band decided to get in the game. Superimposed on traditional African rhythms, the intercultural cross currents were taken up and indigenized by civilian bands that bent the inspiration to their own purposes. The adaha strain of the popular dance music known as highlife, for example, can be traced directly back to the indigenization of Ghanaian brass band music. The Salvation Army’s brass bands are the most obvious surviving descendants of the tradition.
