Music For Brass Ensemble

Welcome to the Compass Rose Brass Ensemble webpage! The CRBE is located in Minnesota and provides a unique musical experience for audiences of all ages.

The National Brass Ensemble (NBE) and conductor Eun Sun Kim present Deified, an album containing music by Wagner and Strauss, as well as world premiere recordings of pieces by Jonathan Bingham and Arturo Sandoval.

When your dad is a well-regarded jazz trumpeter, it's perhaps inevitable that you'll follow in his footsteps. A decade ago, the eight sons of Sun Ra Arkestra member Phlip Cohran did just that, forming The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Here they hook up with their inspirational dad for a first collaborative album for Honest Jon's. In typical fashion, they've taken his influences and playing style as the starting point. So, alongside their usual rousing marching funk, we get treated to a string of more experimental compositions. It's these - particularly the emotional strings and cinematic builds of "Ancestral", or the 15-minute space-brass opus "Zincali" - that really stand out.

The seven brothers embrace a spiritual jazz sound, sans percussion, on their first album since the group’s father, Philip Cohran, passed away in February 2017. “With its cathedral-like, richly resonant acoustics, the new Hypnotic Brass Ensemble album Book Of Sound is a brilliant expression of interplanetary principle. The album is by turns urgent and contemplative, funky and reflective, varied in its textures; but entirely of one piece. Underpinned by concepts of earth's place in the cosmos, held in place by meditation, swirling with notions of history, science, theology, ancestry, there is a rich conceptual brew here.

The Brass Septet Imperial is a Finnish ensemble. Its mission is to honour and revitalise the old Finnish brass septet traditions and at the same time to raise traditional septet playing to the highest artistic standard. Its members are all among the finest masters of their instruments in Finland. The Septet is modelled on the time-honoured Brass Septet Imperial of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra familiar to radio listeners for decades. Its repertoire consists of classic works for this line-up and quality transcriptions. The ensemble also actively seeks out new music for brass septet and commissions works for this collection of instruments. This debut disc, Punaiset ja valkoiset laulut (which literally means ‘Red and White Songs’) of songs across the political divide, presents an interesting selection of both original arrangements for Finnish brass septet arranged roughly a century ago and also brand-new septet arrangements of these traditional works.

"Bach never heard his music played in this way but it is hard to imagine that he would have found the experience unacceptable. The original works from which this programme is drawn are all instrumental and, since the essence of the music is in the lines and their interplay, there is no obvious reason why they should not be entrusted to the matched sounds of a brass ensemble. Indeed, as the annotator points out, no particular instrument(s) is/are specified in the case of Die Kunst der Fuge, so these items cannot even be termed arrangements; the rest are taken from the organ works. The Laubin Brass Ensemble, impeccably accurate in all respects, makes a majestic (if minimally varying) sound, a finely balanced fabric in which each individual thread is easily traceable if one so chooses…This is a very acceptable and revealing way of listening to this music and even if you are not a brass enthusiast you may care to add BWV541, 598 and 631 to your Bach stock, for there is no other present recording of them on CD—and this one is lifelike in the extreme."

The Chicago Gargoyle Brass was founded in 1992 by its Artistic Director, H. Rodney Holmes, as a chamber group of faculty and students at the University of Chicago, whose campus architecture boasts a charming variety of the ensemble’s namesake. By 2006, the ensemble had slowly professionalized and established a residency in the western suburbs at a major church with a full-time professional organist. Over the next five years, the group transformed itself into a specialized brass and organ concert ensemble, comprised of classically trained musicians, performing a wide variety of repertoire in an equally diverse range of settings. Well into its third decade, the Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble maintains its position at the cutting edge of music for brass and organ, commissioning and performing new arrangements and compositions for that instrumental pairing.