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The profile · researched 17 September 2026
Sixteen Sundays at the Howlin' Wolf: the Hot 8 Brass Band carry on without Bennie Pete
Formed out of two New Orleans high-school brass bands in the mid-1990s, the Hot 8 have buried four of their own and still play parades, festivals and clubs. Their 2025 album Big Tuba was named for the founder they lost in 2021; the autumn of 2026 finds them back on home ground with a weekly residency.
Two school bands, welded into one
The Hot 8 began at Alcee Fortier High School in Uptown New Orleans, where sousaphone player Bennie Pete merged the remains of two student outfits — the Looney Tunes Brass Band and the High Steppers Brass Band — with trombonist Jerome Jones and bass drummer Harry Cook. Reference accounts date the merger to 1995; the band's own written history puts it at 1996. The instrumentation was conventional from the start and has barely changed: ten players when everyone shows up, normally three trumpets, three trombones, sousaphone, snare, bass drum and a reed.
What they did with it was less conventional. The Hot 8 took the funk lineage of the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth and pushed it into contemporary R&B, rap and New Orleans bounce, so that a horn line arranged for a street parade could carry a rap hook or a soul cover without changing gear. The apprenticeship was the street itself — second lines, jazz funerals and social aid and pleasure club turnouts — years of it before any of this reached a stage with a lighting rig.
That grounding still governs how the group works. It is a parade band that also tours, rather than a touring band that occasionally parades, and the repertoire is built to survive without amplification, arrangements, or a fixed running order.
The losses the band carries
Four members have died since the band formed. Trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot dead in 1996 at seventeen. Trombonist Demond Dorsey died of a heart attack in 2004, aged twenty-eight, and in the same year trombonist Joseph Williams, aged twenty-two, was killed by police. In 2006 the snare drummer Dinerral Shavers was shot in the head and died at twenty-five. In 2006 trumpeter Terrell 'Burger' Batiste also lost both legs in a highway accident; by 2007 he was performing again on prosthetics, and he remains in the band.
Hurricane Katrina scattered the group across the country in 2005. They regrouped, toured, and played for displaced New Orleanians, and that period brought the wider audience: appearances in Spike Lee's Katrina documentaries in 2006 and 2010, and in David Simon's HBO series Treme. The band that emerged from it was already carrying a public role as well as a musical one.
The heaviest loss came on 6 September 2021, when Bennie Pete died at forty-five from complications of sarcoidosis and Covid-19. He had founded the group, held it together through every earlier death, and played the sousaphone part that everything else was arranged around. The Hot 8 kept working; the question of how to do so without him took another three and a half years to answer on record.
Records, and the label that found them
The recording career was set in motion from Brighton rather than New Orleans. The producer Quantic heard one of the band's covers and brought it to Tru Thoughts; the pair travelled to New Orleans intending to meet and sign the group, and the Hot 8 became the label's first American signing in 2007. Their debut album, Rock with The Hot 8, followed in October 2007 and the partnership has run ever since.
The Life and Times of the Hot 8 Brass Band arrived in November 2012 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Regional Roots Music Album in 2013, which the band did not win. Tombstone, released in May 2013, was dedicated to the members they had lost. The Grammy itself came in a sideways fashion, at the 64th awards in 2022, when the band featured on Jon Batiste's Album of the Year winner.
Between records they built a festival history that runs well beyond Louisiana — Glastonbury, Fuji Rock and Roskilde among them — and collaborations with the Blind Boys of Alabama, Basement Jaxx and Alice Russell. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival remains the annual fixed point.
Big Tuba, and what it is for
Big Tuba, released by Tru Thoughts on 28 February 2025, was the band's first new project in roughly six years, and the title is a direct address to Bennie Pete. The band's statement with the release called him 'more than just our leader; he was a constant galvanising force' and 'a rock in our lives'. The record does not treat that as an occasion for solemnity: it holds to the same mixture of traditional jazz, funk, hip hop and bounce that the group has played in the street for three decades.
The album carries eleven tracks digitally and nine on the vinyl pressing. The advance singles were the title track, a cover of Bill Withers's 'Ain't No Sunshine', and 'Fight Song'. The vinyl edition was issued as a three-colour A-side/B-side pressing with a twelve-inch poster insert and an exclusive seven-inch carrying two tracks making their vinyl debut, while the digital release adds an Al Green cover. Covers have always been part of the argument rather than filler — the band's reading of Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing' has been its best-known recording since long before this album.
The release was followed immediately by touring: the US East Coast, Europe, the UK and Ireland across February, March and April 2025, on the back of a run of sold-out shows in previous years.
Where they stand in September 2026
The most recent document of the band at full strength is their set at the 2025 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, recorded and released by Munck Music. Its track listing shows how the group now builds a set: an introduction, then material run together in medleys — 'Big Tuba' into Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' into 'Miss Alberta', 'La Jean' and 'Fight Song'. New album material sits inside the same continuous flow as the older covers rather than being announced as a new section.
Right now the band is not touring abroad. Sixteen dates are on sale and all of them are in New Orleans: a Wednesday show on 16 September 2026 at the Den at the Howlin' Wolf, followed by the weekly Sunday residency at the Howlin' Wolf itself, running from 20 September through to 27 December 2026. Songkick logs 919 Hot 8 performances in New Orleans, which is the more telling number — this is a working band in its own city that leaves periodically, not a touring act with a hometown.
The band's own website currently carries a note that a vicennial record release is coming, with no date attached. Until that firms up, the Sunday residency is the state of the Hot 8: the same instrumentation, most of the same players, five years on from the death of the man who assembled them.
The show, now
A Hot 8 show in late 2026 means the Howlin' Wolf in New Orleans on a Sunday night — sixteen dates are on sale, starting at the venue's smaller room, the Den, on 16 September 2026 and then running weekly at the main room from 20 September to 27 December. There is no production to speak of: ten or so players across the front of a club stage, three trumpets, three trombones, sousaphone, snare and bass drum, playing the same instrumentation they use in a street parade. The set is built as continuous medleys rather than discrete songs, as the recording of their 2025 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival performance shows, with 'Big Tuba' running into Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', then 'Miss Alberta', 'La Jean' and 'Fight Song'. Covers are load-bearing — the Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers readings sit alongside the originals rather than serving as encores — and the older second-line material is what pulls a room into motion. Audience accounts of the 2025 touring shows consistently describe the energy landing from the first bar rather than building, which is what a band trained on parades and jazz funerals is built to do. No support act is billed for the current residency run and no running time is published; the Sunday nights are late shows, in a club, with the floor open.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · tru-thoughts.co.uk · tru-thoughts.co.uk · hot8brassband.com · hot8brassband.com · songkick.com · songkick.com · munck-music.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Flickr photographer Howie Luvzus · CC BY 2.0
