Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

A household built around horns

Kelan Phil Cohran was born on 8 May 1927 in Oxford, Mississippi, and spent most of his working life in Chicago. He played trumpet in Sun Ra's Arkestra between 1959 and 1961, turning up on records including Fate in a Pleasant Mood and Angels and Demons at Play, and in 1965 he took part in the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Two years later he opened the Affro-Arts Theater on the South Side as a base for Black musicians, and he taught voice and music at Northeastern Illinois University's Center for Inner City Studies. He also built an electrified mbira he called the frankiphone, or space harp, which prompted Maurice White to pick up the electric kalimba in Earth, Wind & Fire.

Eight of Cohran's sons make up the brass front line of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble: Gabriel Hubert, Saiph Graves, Amal Baji Hubert, Jafar Baji Graves, Seba Graves, Tarik Graves and Uttama Hubert among them, on trumpets, trombones and baritone horn, and they are known on stage by nicknames — Hudah, Cid, Baji, Yosh, Clef, Smoove, Rocco. Music was unavoidable in the house. As children and teenagers they performed as the Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble, and played for Harold Washington and for Nelson Mandela.

The rhythm section came from outside the family: Hashim Bunch on bass, Kevin Hunt on guitar and Christopher Anderson on drums.

The subway years and the Honest Jon's run

The brothers stepped away from the group during high school, after a run of deaths in their circle that included their brother Anthony Neal and close friends Robert Lock and Level Todd. They regrouped in 1999 by playing in the Chicago subway, horns and a bass drum, no amplification and no promoter — the arrangement that fixed the band's default setting as a street band that happens to read music.

A self-released debut, Flipside, arrived in 2004, with Jupiter following in 2005, both sold hand to hand. In 2006 they moved to New York. The London label Honest Jon's picked them up and issued Sankofa in 2007, a split with the Egyptian drummer Salah Ragab, then the self-titled Hypnotic Brass Ensemble in 2009, which remains the record most listeners arrive through. A 2012 album, Kelan Philip Cohran and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, put their father's compositions in front of their band — his material, their horns. Book of Sound followed on the same label in 2017, the year Cohran died in Chicago on 28 June, aged 90.

Alongside that catalogue they kept their own imprint, Pheelco, busy: Bulletproof Brass in 2011, Fly: The Customs Prelude in 2013, Sound Rhythm & Form in 2016 and Hypnotic Joints, Volume One in 2017. Bad Boys of Jazz came out through Fat Beats in 2020, and This Is a Mindfulness Drill through Jagjaguwar in 2021 — the first time an American indie of that scale had handled them.

The session book

Very little of the band's reach was built on radio. It was built on other people's records and stages. They have worked with Mos Def, Wu-Tang Clan, Prince, Gorillaz, Snoop Dogg, Erykah Badu and Childish Gambino, which is why their sound is familiar to audiences who have never bought one of their albums.

Film and television did the rest. Their track War was used in The Hunger Games and again in the fourth season of Fargo. It is also the song they have played live more than any other, logged nine times in the public setlist archive, and it functions as the band's calling card rather than a closing showpiece.

Standing in 2026

The recording pace has picked up after the long gap that followed This Is a Mindfulness Drill. Hypnotic Joints, Vol. II appeared in 2024, a BadBoysofJazz compilation followed in 2025, and the group then moved to singles: King on 24 April 2026 and Time on 2 October 2026, which is the most recent release under their own name.

Touring in 2026 has split between European festivals and American jazz rooms. On 4 July they played the nineteenth Jazzablanca in Casablanca, which ran from 2 to 11 July at Anfa Park, on a bill that also carried Scorpions, José James, Brian Jackson and the Moroccan singer Mehdi Nassouli, with whom the brothers were paired for a joint set. On 26 and 27 September they played the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York, three shows across the weekend.

One date is on sale as of early October 2026: Blue Note Los Angeles on Wednesday 21 October, with two sets, at 7pm and 9.30pm, in a room that holds about 200 people. No support act is listed for either set. The cumulative numbers explain why they are still booked this heavily — the public gigography puts them at 481 shows, with New York (50), London (44) and Dublin (42) their most frequently played cities.

The reputation, measured

The critical record is consistent rather than ecstatic. An aggregate of 16 concert reviews puts them at 75 per cent, with the recurring verdict that the live show outruns the records. GoldenPlec called them one of the most captivating live shows of today in December 2014; Hot Press described them as one of the hottest tickets in town in December 2015; The AU Review, writing in June 2011, settled on an amazing hour and a half or so of hypnotic brass excellence, which is close to the actual running time.

Audience comment from the 2025 European run makes a narrower and more useful point: that the band changes the set from night to night while keeping the standard and the crowd work steady. That is a street-band habit carried into ticketed rooms, and it is the main reason repeat attendance is high in the cities they return to most.

What comes next

Two 2026 singles, a Blue Note double-header in New York and a Blue Note date in Los Angeles point towards a band consolidating rather than expanding — the Chicago street repertoire now being played in seated, two-set jazz-club formats rather than standing clubs and festival fields alone. Nothing has been announced about a third Hypnotic Joints volume or a full album to follow the singles.

The family line is now the group's structural fact rather than its backstory. Their father's catalogue, his teaching and his instrument-building sit behind the writing, and since his death in 2017 the brothers have been the working custodians of it.