Brass Band

When New Orleans' ReBirth Brass Band is in the house, you just have to dance - even if you don't know how. One of the smartest things that International House did for this New Orleans band's visit Saturday night was to clear out a dance floor in front of the stage. It was well-used. ReBirth is a wild, rough-edged collective of young men faithful to tradition. Beginning its first hourlong set with Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'," the band's rollicking, polyphonic, chant-laden sound quickly loosened any inhibitions in the diverse crowd.

Tyrone Breuninger remembers that his grandfather, Grover, played euphonium at least five nights a week during the 1930s, for bands in East Greenville, Sumneytown, Green Lane, Red Hill and Pennsburg. "Within those five miles, there were five bands," said Breuninger, whose grandfather encouraged him to play the tuba-like euphonium, too, and later the trombone. But the heyday of the brass band has passed. Summer concert schedules are shorter, and at many band shells and parks, Sousa marches and show tunes are heard only on the Fourth of July.

Tyrone Breuninger remembers that his grandfather, Grover, played euphonium at least five nights a week during the 1930s, for bands here and in Sumneytown, Green Lane, Red Hill and Pennsburg. "Within those five miles, there were five bands," said Breuninger, whose grandfather encouraged him to play the tuba-like euphonium, too, and later the trombone. But the heyday of the brass band has passed. Summer concert schedules are shorter, and at many band shells and parks, Sousa marches and show tunes are heard only on the Fourth of July.

Jambalaya Jam, the festival of New Orleans music and food that last year attracted 60,000 people to the Great Plaza at Penn's Landing, will be repeated on the last weekend in May. The four-day shindig will star the classic Dixieland sounds of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the rhythm and blues of the Neville Brothers, plus Cajun bands, gospel groups and the kind of brass-band street music that last year had Philadelphians joining in giddy,...

The rousing tunes served up with such flair by the defiant brass band of coal miners in Brassed Off! struck a responsive chord in Britain, where the film became a huge hit. Its themes are so timely and universal, the melodies should play just as well here. The miners of Grimley Colliery in a drab, one-industry town in Yorkshire are threatened with the closing of their pit by the government even though it still turns a profit. Using deft and touching strokes, Brassed Off! establishes that what the penny-pinching suits in Whitehall propose means a lot more than the loss of jobs.

Mummers were as playful as the Campbell Kids as they took to South 2nd Street in Pennsport yesterday for their annual Soup Sunday celebration. They made a special effort to put at ease South Philadelphia fans who were concerned about what effect the 1995 Market Street parade might have on Two Street mini-parades like Soup Sunday, and the New Year's Day bash there after the big parade uptown. "The Market Street march will not have any effect on our commitment to 2nd Street," said Tom Kelhower, captain of the Riverfront Comic Brigade.

It's been 33 years since Olga and Herb Kantaut left West Germany and the culture they grew up with, but yesterday they did a lot more than remember old ways. Under a warm late-summer sun in Northeast Philadelphia, the couple feasted on knockwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad and German beer. They talked with German friends, and they swayed to German folk music, played by a brass band straight from Bavaria. The Kantauts, from Marlton, N.J., were surrounded by reminders of their heritage - women wearing brightly embroidered dirndl costumes, Germans fluent in the mother tongue, the lively schuhplattler dancing and the hearty toasts that have long characterized ethnic festivities.

The highlights of this weekend's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema are musical - a drama about a brass band in Britain, and live accompaniment to the silent classic "The Lost World. " Tomorrow's program includes "Brassed Off!" - starring Ewan MacGregor and Pete Postlethwaite as members of a brass band in a mining town where the coal mine is ready to close. Despite the looming economic disaster, the working-class band resolves to stick together, all the way through the national brass-band competition.

THE LATE Pete Postle- thwaite had a gruff epitaph carved for him in last year's hit "The Town," playing a mob boss to reluctant employee/bank robber Ben Affleck. "You're an old man with a [messed] up face who don't know his glory days are behind him," hissed Affleck, who also directed the movie, and who no doubt hired Postlethwaite with that line in mind. If there were a Mount Rushmore for great character actors, Postlethwaite's striking, rocky, blocky mug would be on it. "He wasn't a matinee idol," said director Jim Sheridan in the Hollywood Reporter . "Pete's looks were never going to get him roles as a good-looking Hollywood star.

Somewhere, James E. Myers probably was tapping his feet as he heard "Rock Around the Clock" played for him yesterday, though his casket had been placed in a gold-plated, glitter-covered vault that glistened in the sun. Under a pine tree about 30 feet away from the grave site at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, the 18-member Bishop McDevitt High School band - accustomed to performing at football games and holiday parades - played its first funeral yesterday,...

THE LATE Pete Postle- thwaite had a gruff epitaph carved for him in last year's hit "The Town," playing a mob boss to reluctant employee/bank robber Ben Affleck. "You're an old man with a [messed] up face who don't know his glory days are behind him," hissed Affleck, who also directed the movie, and who no doubt hired Postlethwaite with that line in mind. If there were a Mount Rushmore for great character actors, Postlethwaite's striking, rocky, blocky mug would be on it. "He wasn't a matinee idol," said director Jim Sheridan in the Hollywood Reporter . "Pete's looks were never going to get him roles as a good-looking Hollywood star.

The year that came to a close Friday night was a good one for Trombone Shorty, the New Orleans multi-instrumentalist born Troy Andrews, who blew out the old and rang in the new with his accomplished and energetic party band, Orleans Avenue, in a two-hour-plus show at a sold-out World Cafe Live. Shorty, who also plays the trumpet (with popped-out Dizzy Gillespie cheeks), has stood taller than his stage name might lead you to believe for quite some time. The rising band leader, who turns 25 Sunday, was fronting his own brass band by the time he was 6. But while New Orleans music aficionados have been onto the prematurely charismatic prodigy - the younger brother of trumpeter James Andrews and grandson of singer Jessie "Ooh Poo Pah Doo" Hill - the wider world got word only in 2010.

SEVEN DAYS to a national championship. March 25 to April 1, 1985   MONDAY, March 25   In Memphis to spend some more time with the Memphis State Tigers. The town is crazy. The basketball program seems a little shady, even to fairly naive eyes. No one knew at the time that the Tigers' appearance in the tournament would end up being vacated because the team used an ineligible player - or about the allegations of point-shaving, for that matter. It was a classic scene: encouraging signs in every store window, desperate scramble for tickets, joyous preparations everywhere.

On Mondays, after dinner and before sunset, about 35 men and women gather at Springton Lake Presbyterian Church in Newtown Square for three hours. It's not Bible study. It's a rehearsal of the Marple Newtown Community Band. This year, the band celebrates its 10th anniversary. "We are a group of friends who play music. The quality of our music is very good," said Brian Gillin, band president. "Our members are ages 18 through 80. Some join right after high school or college, and others are new to an instrument.

Somewhere, James E. Myers probably was tapping his feet as he heard "Rock Around the Clock" played for him yesterday, though his casket had been placed in a gold-plated, glitter-covered vault that glistened in the sun. Under a pine tree about 30 feet away from the grave site at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, the 18-member Bishop McDevitt High School band - accustomed to performing at football games and holiday parades - played its first funeral yesterday,...

Mayor Rendell measures in at a svelte Xtra Large for the wench dress he'll wear New Year's Day at 6 a.m. in the mini-Mummers strut that wraps up the city's 24-hour millennium fete. The dress is white bridal satin trimmed with Midas touch gold lame', said seamstress Lil Haines, who did the photo-op fitting at City Hall yesterday. She's sewn about 700 of them for members of wench brigades who will dance with Hizzoner and return later Saturday morning in the regular Mummers Parade.

Services will be held tomorrow for William J. "Curly" Conners Sr., a member of the Ferko String Band since 1941 and its chaplain, and the unofficial historian for Philadelphia Mummery, who died Thursday. He was 89 and lived in Lawndale. Born and raised in South Philadelphia, Conners was himself a part of Mummer history. He marched in his first parade in 1924 with a brass band called the Epiphany Naval Battalion. "He was one of our last links with our founder, Joe Ferko" - who founded the band in 1921.

The Red Hill Band will turn 100 soon, but it still has teeth. Big, brass shiny teeth that have real bite when it comes to making music. It still has its vim and vigor, too, thanks to infusions of new blood through the years - vigor enough to play dozens of parades, festivals and community concerts throughout Montgomery County every season. While its contemporaries - the community bands that were so plentiful earlier in this century - have faded, victims of age and changing times, the Red Hill Band plays on, performing the marches, show tunes, classical songs and old swing standards that epitomize band music's golden age. Recently, it recorded its fourth compact disc, scheduled for release in the spring.

Joseph Molnar cringes whenever he spots those ubiquitous white vinyl chairs on patios and front lawns throughout suburbia. To him, they are reminders that in today's throwaway society, people favor cheap things over those of quality. Molnar, 65, is an ironsmith who learned his craft in his native Hungary before immigrating to Delaware County in 1957. Even then, he reflected recently, the economy of plastics was changing the face of his adopted country. "Vinyl and fiberglass are replacing everything, even wood," he said.

Four heroes - three of them living, one dead - helped to make Lithuanian Independence Day a bittersweet celebration here yesterday. In church halls and community centers, there was the usual dancing and merriment marking Lithuania's freedom from Russia 81 years ago. But the Army and the Lithuanian American community also used the occasion to honor three local firefighters who risked their lives on a Bosnian minefield to retrieve a slain Lithuanian...