Landmark On Main Street Announces Mardi Gras Party

It's party time at the Jeanne Rimsky Theater when we kick off Mardi Gras in style on Saturday, April 9, 2019.

Celebrating over 40 years since their founding in 1977, New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band has taken the traditional foundation of brass band music and incorporated it into a blend of genres including bebop jazz, funk and R&B/Soul.

This unique sound, described by the band as a 'musical gumbo,' has allowed the Dirty Dozen to tour across 5 continents and more than 30 countries, record 12 studio albums and collaborate with a range of artists from Modest Mouse to Widespread Panic to Norah Jones. Forty-plus years later, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band is a world famous music machine whose name is synonymous with genre-bending romps and high-octane performances.

New Orleans brass band-meets-Mardi Gras Indian band Cha Wa radiates the fiery energy of the best features of the city's street culture.

There's also a more serious, social message at work in Cha Wa's music. Over the years their songs have tackled issues from the '50s-era Jim Crow vagrancy law to the development of Mardi Gras Indian culture.

"We dress up in the Indian suits to pay homage to the Native American Indians, because around the time of slavery, they were the first ones to take us in," says singer J'Wan Boudreaux. "Everything on our suits is handmade -- the beads, the patterns, we sew together pieces of fabric and make the panels, we make the boots -- everything."

Not that you need a firm understanding of Indian or brass band culture to feel the dance-ready vibrations of Cha Wa's new music. "It's dance music so I think people are attracted to it. Even if people have no idea what the history is, it's automatically infectious," they explain. "J'wan's the next generation. He's keeping this flame lit."

Tickets for Dirty Dozen Brass Band & Cha Wa are available through Landmark Box Office 516.767-6444 or www.landmarkonmainstreet.org. Premium $46 (Friends $41), Select $38 (Friends $33), Standard $28 (Friends $23)

Our 2018-19 Season is made possible thanks to our Partners in Performing Arts: Harding Real Estate, Peter & Jeri Dejana Family Foundation, Peter & Dorette Forman Foundation, Ruskin Moscou Faltischek Partners, Town of North Hempstead, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock and Winthrop University Hospital. Landmark on Main Street also receives support from the New York State Council on the Arts.

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