Sass-A-Brass

roots

Sass-a-Brass is a Kansas City street parade brass band formed in 2018 and billed as the city's LGBTQ+ brass band, drawing on New Orleans second-line and Mardi Gras traditions and on the activist HONK street-band movement. It was co-founded and is led by Rosie O'Brien, a sousaphone player turned arts organizer, and first assembled to march in the inaugural Lawrence Pride parade in 2018. The group is unamplified and roving rather than stage-bound, and carries roughly thirty rotating members who turn out as their schedules allow. O'Brien has said the band's mission is to create a supportive environment for queer and women musicians in a Kansas City jazz scene that remains largely male, and that it deliberately recruits players across a wide range of skill levels so the ensemble stays accessible. Its book mixes celebratory second-line material with protest songs and labor-organizing tunes, an approach O'Brien has summarised as making fun music that also carries a liberatory thesis. Sass-a-Brass plays Pride events, street parades and festivals across Kansas City and Lawrence, among them Boulevardia, Lawrence Pride, People's Pride KC in the West Bottoms, PorchFest, the KC Streetcar and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's Night/Shift. The band holds open community rehearsals through its January-to-February Mardi Gras season and takes part in HONK! Fest, the annual festival of activist parade bands.

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