Rebirth Brass Band

A school band room in Tremé

Rebirth came out of the few streets that produced most of the modern brass-band book. Phillip Frazier — Tuba Phil — his younger brother Keith and the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins were classmates at Joseph S. Clark Senior High School in Tremé, and in 1983 they took the instruments they had learned on in the school band room out to the French Quarter to play for tips. The name was a statement of intent about what a brass band could be: the older New Orleans ensembles worked a book of hymns and marches, and Rebirth kept the second-line rhythm underneath while pulling funk, R&B, soul and later hip-hop over the top.

Keith Frazier's contribution to that rhythm is a piece of improvised engineering. He plays bass drum with a cymbal mounted above it, striking the drum with one hand and the cymbal with the other using a flathead screwdriver — a single player producing the pulse and the backbeat that street parades normally need two for.

Ruffins left to lead his own bands and became a fixture of the Tremé club scene in his own right. The Fraziers stayed. Both are still listed in the band, which makes Rebirth one of the very few New Orleans groups whose founding rhythm section has held for more than four decades.

The records, and the one that won

The discography starts in 1984 with Here to Stay! on Arhoolie, cut when the players were still teenagers. Feel Like Funkin' It Up followed on Rounder in 1989 and produced a title track that other bands now play as standard repertoire; Do Whatcha Wanna arrived on Mardi Gras Records in 1991 and did the same thing again, more emphatically. Take It to the Street (Rounder, 1992), Rollin' (Rounder, 1994) and We Come to Party (Shanachie, 1997) ran through the decade, and in 1999 Louisiana Red Hot released The Main Event: Live at the Maple Leaf, recorded at the bar where the band had already been playing weekly for years.

The 2000s brought Hot Venom (Mardi Gras, 2001) and two albums for Tipitina's Records, Rebirth for Life in 2004 and 25th Anniversary in 2008. Then came the record that changed the band's standing outside Louisiana. Rebirth of New Orleans, issued by Basin Street Records in 2011, reached number one on the CMJ jazz chart and won Best Regional Roots Music Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards — the first year that category existed, which makes Rebirth its inaugural holder. Move Your Body followed on Basin Street in 2014.

Since then the catalogue has gone quiet while the diary has not. The most recent release listed is a concert recording, Recorded Live at the 2019 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, put out by Munckmix in 2019. There is no studio album from the 2020s. For a band whose reputation was always built on the room rather than the console, that gap says less than it would for most groups, but it does mean anyone coming to Rebirth now meets them as a live act first.

Tuesday at the Maple Leaf

The fixed point in all of this is a weekly booking at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, Uptown — a late Tuesday set the band has held for more than 25 years by its own booking agency's count, and which the venue still advertises as a standing engagement, first come first served, with limited seating. It is where the 1999 live album was recorded, where visiting musicians sit in, and where the current lineup gets tested week after week in a room small enough that the horns work without amplification.

Rebirth's wider presence in the city runs through HBO's Treme, in which band members appear repeatedly. One of the series' storylines drew directly on their lives: in 2007 the snare drummer Derrick Tabb and the trombonist Glen David Andrews were arrested while playing at a street memorial, an incident fictionalised in the show and argued over in New Orleans as a question about whose culture the parade rules were written for. Tabb, who has since moved on from the band, went on to co-found The Roots of Music, which teaches instruments to city schoolchildren — the same pipeline that fed Rebirth in the first place.

Phil Frazier's health, and a band built to carry it

In November 2018, in the band's 35th year, OffBeat reported that Phillip Frazier had suffered a second stroke and faced severe health difficulties, and that the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic had opened a fund to cover his medical costs. The band's anniversary date at the Howlin' Wolf went ahead on 21 November that year, and Rebirth kept working.

Part of the reason it could is the way the group is staffed. Around the Fraziers sit players with long tenure — the trombonist Stafford Agee has been in the band since 1988, Glenn Hall III since 2015 — alongside a younger intake including Jenard and Terrence Andrews, Chadrick Honoré, Clifton Smith, Caleb Windsley, Vincent Broussard and Eric Gordon. It functions less like a fixed nine-piece than like a parade band: the book is held collectively, and the personnel on any given night are whoever is on the road.

Where they stand in 2026

The touring year has been steady rather than spectacular in scale. Rebirth played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds Race Course on 3 May 2026 in a mid-afternoon slot, Michael Arnone's Crawfish Fest at the Sussex County Fairgrounds in New Jersey on 30 May, an outdoor set at Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park in Lower Manhattan on 9 July and a club date at the Dakota in Minneapolis on 12 July. September brought a home show at Tipitina's on the 11th, Beston Hall at Nazareth University in Pittsford, New York on the 13th, the Borderland Festival at Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora on the 19th and the XPoNential Festival at Wiggins Park in Camden on the 20th.

The genuinely new thing happens next month. On 18 October 2026 Rebirth play 170 Russell in Melbourne as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, doors at 7pm, tickets $89, with Horns of Leroy featuring Thndo opening; the festival bills it as the band's first Australian performance after four decades. Sydney follows at the Oxford Art Factory in Darlinghurst on 20 October.

After that the calendar returns to familiar rooms: two nights at The Hamilton Live in Washington, DC on 30 and 31 December 2026, then the Dakota in Minneapolis on 18 January 2027, Sam's Burger Joint in San Antonio on 7 February and The Chapel in San Francisco on 9 February. The endorsements the band trades on are old but unusually specific — Flea calls the music hard as hell and free as a ray of light, Ani DiFranco describes seeing them as a transcendent musical experience, and the New York Times, which placed them in its 2023 piece on five minutes that will make you love New Orleans jazz, has called them a New Orleans institution.

What the set looks like now

Fan-logged setlists from this year show a band that shortens rather than softens for festivals. At Borderland on 19 September 2026 the logged running order was Jambalaya (On the Bayou), I Like It Like This, Feel Like Funkin' It Up and Do Whatcha Wanna — four numbers, the last two being the songs other brass bands have taken from them. The XPoNential set the following day logged Grazing in the Grass and It's All Over Now. Club nights run longer: the Dakota show on 12 July 2026 was logged as doors at 8pm and a finish at 9.25pm, roughly the length of a single sit-down set.

Staging is close to nothing. Horns stand in a line at the front, two drummers and the sousaphone hold the floor behind them, and there is no backline to speak of — the same configuration that works on a street corner, moved indoors. Songs run into each other over a continuous groove, soloists step forward in turn, and the arrangements are elastic enough that a four-song festival slot and a two-hour bar night can be built from the same material.