Listening from the Bottom

An Introduction to Three Essays on the Tuba, Sousaphone, and the Contemporary Low-Brass Imagination

Image created with DALL·E.

What began as a single blog about the tuba in jazz has become a series of three connected essays. That expansion reflects the history of the instruments themselves and the different musical worlds that gather around them.

The first essay, “The Lasting Legacy of the Tuba in Jazz,” began with a familiar historical problem. The tuba is often treated as an early jazz bass instrument that disappeared once the string bass became common. That account leaves too much out. The instrument remained active in jazz orchestration, small groups, experimental ensembles, studio work, and the hands of musicians who developed it as a featured improvising voice.

The essay followed the tuba through those settings. It considers the musicians who established the instrument’s place in recorded jazz, from early bass players and orchestral specialists to modern soloists. After its initial publication, a reader, Stanislav “Stas” Cheremushkin (often known online by his tubastas YouTube handle), reminded me that Rich Matteson and the euphonium also belonged in the story. He was right. That addition clarified the larger subject. The history concerned a family of low-brass voices whose roles had changed across generations.

Even with that broader frame, one absence became increasingly difficult to ignore. Another reader, Chris Butcher, asked the question directly: no write-up on Tuba Fats himself? He was right as well, and his question named the absence precisely.

The sousaphone received comparatively little attention.

That omission was strange because the sousaphone is central to my own work as a musician and scholar. I have spent years studying New Orleans brass band traditions, second lines, Congo Square, Black community life, and the continuities connecting those practices to jazz. I also know the instrument through performance. Its weight, airflow, projection, and relationship with the drums have shaped the way I hear music from the bottom of an ensemble.

At first, I understood the omission as an editorial decision. A full discussion of the sousaphone would have changed the proportions of the original essay. The instrument leads into street processions, funerals, social aid and pleasure clubs, neighborhood parades, schools, dance, public space, and the collective work of the brass band. Those subjects required another frame.

That recognition led to the second essay, “The Bass Voice in Motion: The Sousaphone and the Living History of the New Orleans Brass Band.”

This essay traces the bass voice through New Orleans brass band history. It begins before the sousaphone entered common use, when bass horns, helicons, and tubas supplied the bottom of nineteenth-century military bands and wind ensembles. It then considers how New Orleans musicians adapted the sousaphone to the demands of outdoor performance, procession, dancing, and collective improvisation.

The instrument’s design made it practical for movement, but its musical identity came from the players. They developed bass lines that could establish harmony, interact with the drums, answer the horns, signal transitions, and shape the movement of dancers. A sousaphonist might improvise throughout a performance without taking a conventional solo. Variation appears through rhythm, articulation, register, note length, repetition, and the changing relationship between the bass line and the percussion.

That history also requires attention to individual musicians. Joseph “Red” Clark and Wilbert “Bird” Tillman belong to an earlier brass band world. Allan and Ben Jaffe represent one line of preservation, institutional work, and family transmission. Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen stands near the center of the modern lineage. His playing connected traditional brass band practice with blues, rhythm and blues, funk, and the changing Black musical environment of New Orleans.

Kirk Joseph developed the sousaphone as a walking, improvising, and compositionally independent bass voice with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Philip “Tuba Phil” Frazier made the bass line a hook, a loop, and a defining element of Rebirth’s sound. Edward Lee Jr. helped place the instrument within the layered hip-hop and funk arrangements of the Soul Rebels. Bennie Pete’s work with the Hot 8 Brass Band reveals how musical leadership can include mentorship, organization, survival, and responsibility to an ensemble. Jeffrey Hills brought extraordinary melodic freedom and expressive control—and an amazing ear for subsitutions!—to the bass function. Matt Perrine approaches the instrument through composition and arrangement, often shaping a piece’s architecture from the bass chair. Steve Glenn represents the versatility required of a working New Orleans musician moving among brass bands, jazz orchestras, parades, traditional repertory, and music from several parts of the world.

As that essay developed, another group of musicians kept entering the discussion. Their work remained connected to the broader history of low brass, but the New Orleans brass band lineage could not explain it all.

Nat McIntosh helped establish the sousaphone as a compositional center within Youngblood Brass Band. His playing translates elements of hip-hop production into acoustic performance through loops, beatboxing, multiphonics, percussive attacks, and sounds associated with turntables and electronic instruments. Damon “Tuba Gooding Jr.” Bryson brought the sousaphone into The Roots, one of the most visible hip-hop ensembles in the world. His musical formation in the United House of Prayer connects his work to a Black sacred brass tradition. His career with The Roots places that sound inside concert performance, television production, comedy, popular-song quotation, and the rapid musical decisions required of a live house band.

Bill Muter has developed an independent low-brass platform through performance, pedagogy, production, international touring, hip-hop, and online media. Sérgio Carolino approaches the tuba through orchestral playing, jazz, funk, contemporary composition, free improvisation, extended technique, and Portugal’s community-band culture. Devon “TubaRed” Taylor joins New Orleans experience with the demands of Los Angeles studio work, film, television, hip-hop, jazz, and multi-instrumental performance.

These musicians demanded a third essay.

The third essay is “The Contemporary Low-Brass Imagination: Tuba and Sousaphone Across Jazz, Hip-Hop, Experimental Music, and Global Performance.”

This essay follows the tuba and sousaphone into professional and creative settings that older histories of the instrument rarely anticipated: hip-hop rhythm sections, experimental trios, television bands, film sessions, amplified ensembles, international collaborations, and independent projects built around the artistic identity of the low-brass player.

The connections among these musicians do not depend upon a single lineage or style. Their work grows from different communities, educational systems, repertoires, and professional circumstances. What they share is an expanded understanding of the bass role.

The low-brass player may establish the groove, introduce the principal motive, organize the harmony, imitate electronic production, create percussion, improvise above the ensemble, write the arrangement, produce the recording, and design the project. The instrument continues to provide weight and foundation. Each musician in this essay had to adapt it to a particular ensemble, a particular set of production tools, and a particular repertory before it could do any of that work.

My own work appears within the series because I write from inside these histories. I approach them as an ethnomusicologist, African American Studies scholar, educator, trombonist, bass trombonist, tuba player, and performer-scholar. My recorded work has placed the tuba in early jazz repertory, dub, improvised music, orchestral writing, theatrical projects, and ensembles where bass, countermelody, texture, and solo voice overlap.

The sousaphone is both my subject and one of the ways I understand the music.

Playing low brass changes how I understand rhythm, breath, movement, ensemble balance, and the labor required to make a performance cohere. It also reminds me that the history of an instrument cannot be separated from the people, institutions, and communities that gave its sound meaning.

Together, the three essays follow related histories:

“The Lasting Legacy of the Tuba in Jazz” examines the tuba and euphonium across jazz history, orchestration, recording, and improvisation.

“The Bass Voice in Motion: The Sousaphone and the Living History of the New Orleans Brass Band” follows the sousaphone through New Orleans streets, neighborhoods, institutions, ensembles, and generations.

“The Contemporary Low-Brass Imagination: Tuba and Sousaphone Across Jazz, Hip-Hop, Experimental Music, and Global Performance” considers the musicians who have developed the instruments within contemporary performance, production, pedagogy, and international low-brass culture.

Each essay begins in a different place. Together, they form a larger history of musicians who have shaped rhythm, harmony, motion, and collective sound from the bottom of the ensemble.