Soul Rebels Brass Band

Here's the 1,094th thing I love about New Orleans: You'll be driving through the ghetto and a car will pull up alongside you blaring music out of its open windows. In just about every other city in America, you would hear 50 Cent or Lil Jon or some other crunkmeister. Not so in the Big Easy. There you just might hear something like the brass band trouble funk of the Soul Rebels, another of the Dirty Dozen's spiritual children. "Making music by any means necessary" is the Soul Rebels' motto, and they march toward that end with a fearsome arsenal of bass and snare drums, saxophone, trumpets, tuba and trombone. The best thing about New Orleans brass bands is their wide-ranging repertoires, and the Soul Rebels are no exception. You'll hear everything from ragtime to gospel to R&B to jazz to hip-hop in the Soul Rebels' sonic stew, and what's more, all of it will be funkier than a pimped-out El Camino with a statue of James Brown on the dash. Most of the Soul Rebels were drum majors and/or members of the Gulf Coast's finest marching bands -- TSU's Ocean of Soul and Southern University's Human Jukebox -- so expect the show to feel like a scene from Drumline.