HBE are eight brothers from the south side of Chicago. They come from an extraordinary musical family. Other sisters and brothers are professional musicians, their mothers are singers, and Philip Cohran, their father, has roots running back to Mississippi, his time in the musical hothouse of 1940s St Louis, and his seminal role with Sun Ra in Chicago in the 1950s. When Ra left for the east coast in 1960, Phil stayed in Chicago. By the time the members of the HBE were growing up, Phil’s work as a musical activist and educator had led to the establishment of a space called the Sun Ark in a warehouse behind the family home above a furniture shop. At night when they went to bed the children would hear their father rehearsing with his band the Circle Of Sound. They were wakened at 6 a.m. for several hours’ music practice before going to school. From an early age they were a central part of their father’s Youth Ensemble. Coinciding with this involvement in their father’s ethos was a parallel passion. “At night we used to sneak under the covers and listen to NWA and Public Enemy. Ice Cube and Eazy-E were our heroes.” Very young, they formed their first group, GWC (Gangsters With A Curfew), which morphed into Wolf Pak (War On Pigs And Klan). “We used to hum. We used to all hum the same way that we play our horns now, everybody on beat boxes or making harmonies, and we’d pass the mike around and rap.” By the end of the nineties, with everyone out of school, they brought together their musicianship, their jazz roots and their hip hop sensibility, and made a living busking on the streets of Chicago. They came up up with their name after an incident on the El: playing on the platform, a man in a suit watched them for hours, missing train after train, till in the end he walked up to them and said, “You guys just hypnotized me”. Crucial to the mix was their burgeoning skills as composers, which meant the music they played really was their own. (They wrote all of the tracks on this album except Alyo, written by their father, and Rabbit Hop, written by Moondog.) Eventually the group transferred to New York City, and after playing out relentlessly, including gigs with Mos Def and Erykah Badu, and some particularly incendiary shows in Europe, they have come to be known as one of the hottest and most individual bands around. This album is the result of a chance encounter in 2005. November, a cold market day in Portobello Road with all the customary Portobello ingredients: crowds snaking by the stalls selling flowers and fruit and vegetables, the Salvation Army on guard outside Woolworths, Italian tourists milling around looking for Julia Roberts' blue door. Only thing, the soundtrack was different. Instead of the panman in the Santa hat playing Christmas carols, there were strains of Ellington and the swagger of brassy funk cutting through the morning fog. Stationed on the corner of Talbot Road... eight horns and a drum kit are rocking Ladbroke Grove. Since our initial meeting Honest Jon’s and HBE have stayed close. We pretty much bought the entire runs of their first two ten-inches, and in 2007 they contributed a monster of a track — Sankofa — to our Tony Allen remix project, Lagos Shake. This made a stirring fanfare for our Chop Up shows last summer, and in London, Lyon and New York, HBE tore it up both as leaders and in support of artists as diverse as Victoria Williams and Candi Staton, rousing and tender in turns. Recorded on the back of the Africa Express trip to Lagos last October, during a three-day stop-over in London, with the drummer's stool shared by Malcolm Catto from the The Heliocentrics, Sola Akingbola from Jamiroquai, and the one and only Tony Allen. Another friend from the Nigeria trip, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers turned up at the session: handed Paul Simonon’s bass, parked up in the studio, he muttered, “Woah, so this is the thing that this was written on”, hammering out Guns Of Brixton. So here it is. Honest Jon’s are proud to present the gorgeous, thrilling music of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. On the tracks, in the words of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble: Alyo — Alyo Tolbert was the star dancer for the Montu Dance Company in Chicago. They were part of the music scene we grew up with. Our father wrote this song for Alyo after he died. When he danced he was electrifying. People would call out his name to drive him on higher — “Alyo! Alyo!”. Gibbous — There’s waxing Gibbous and waning Gibbous – it’s the phase of the moon just before and just after it's full. We wrote this song in the street. We’d been out in the Loop all day. It was cold and we weren’t making any money. We thought, Fuck it, let’s create some music. LT laid down the bassline and the song came in about 10 minutes. And then a beautiful woman walked by and we had the name. Gibbous. War — Clef brought this in and Yosh went away and worked on it and he got it wrong , he changed the count and he changed the notes. But that’s how the song was created, because we stuck with the way Yosh did it. It’s based in a subliminal way on pop's song African Skies. You find a lot of our early material was ballads. As the band has got older, and played more gigs, playing for people who want to dance, we’ve got more uptempo. A fighting song? Not really – it’s one to make you get up and move. Ballicki Bone — We used to sing Ballicki Bone when we were kids. Next door to our house there was a huge overgrown vacant yard. We’d pretend it was our jungle. We’d have our arrows and spears and stuff and Ballicki Bone was our own private song we’d sing walking through the jungle, or when we were inside cleaning our rooms. Flipside — I was writing this song for my daughter who had just been born, and like often happens the brothers took it and made something new. When we played it on the street at first we called it the new song. This was when we didn’t have a drummer and we didn’t have an album to sell. We just played for donations. Our friend Robert — his nickname was Freddie Flipside, he was like a brother of ours — started coming along with us, to be our announcer. He was so good at it. He’d say crazy stuff — “Crack costs money, this music's not free!” Everybody would be laughing, and money was going in the box. He was a vinyl collector, especially music from the seventies, he called it swing. And he loved this song — “It’s got that swing!”. One day after we were playing, he got shot dead, driving in a car with LT, Cid and Yosh. So now the song is called Flipside. Marcus Garvey — I (Clef) wrote it when I was riding home on my bicycle one night. I was shit-drunk and it was raining and I was scared I was going to fall off. I was thinking of the Copa Cubana — I wrote the whole thing in my head with that Cuban sound, riding home in the rain. Jupiter — The planet of expansion, so that’s what the song does, it expands. This was created the same day that Hypnotic was. Mama Aquilla wrote lyrics for it: “ I am the moon, the stars, the planets, dreams of eternity flying across the sky”. Party Started — Written when LT was sick, Halloween 2003. He had to go to hospital. While he was sick we wanted to keep going so we had a deep rehearsal and came up with five songs. Smoov played sousaphone. Check how the drums go boom boom every measure. That beat’s called the Chicago Jook. Rabbit Hop — Moondog played in the streets of New York fifty years before we did, so this makes sense. Damon’s idea for the Chop Up live shows we did last summer. Sankofa — Done for Honest Jon’s when they were doing their Tony Allen remixes. We just got sent the drum line. We didn’t know what to do, we just knew we wanted to do a melody badder than Fela! Rocco came up with the first phrase and Cid added to it and it went around the room. Clef tried to take us up right to the top of the register, but we said no. Hypnotic — One of our first songs, written for an open-mike session at the Club Alphonse on 13th and State Street, because we needed something fresh. Satin Sheets — Satin Sheets is the first Hypnotic song, the very first one where all of us were involved.