Hello, we are the Band Land Brass Band!

We are a group of local high school students who want to play fun music outside to make people dance. Born in part out of a dissatisfaction with the rigid, militaristic, and less-than-fun nature of school marching band, we strive to use music for creative expression, liberation, and pleasure. We think that music should be a fun activity to unwind after a long day of standardized testing, not a tedious rehearsal on the night before a big essay is due that you need to spend hours practicing for.

Let's keep kids ON the street!

To keep kids ON the streets!
In other words, to bring the music and culture of HONK bands to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (read further and that will make sense), and to bring CRLS students into the HONK community.

Yes

We are a group of high school students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, inspired by the HONK festival to make music together. We could certainly bring a younger and more diverse audience to the festival, and I would say we have a unique youthful energy.

So far our only gig has been the school talent show (like I said, we are a very new band) but we are booked to play at a gathering of the arts department next month. We also were offered a spot to play in the March For Our Lives and in gun violence-related school walkouts, but we did not have enough repertoire put together at that time to play those gigs. In general, I envision us doing mostly school-related gigs, with activist or honk community gigs once in a while. We've also thought about performing in conjunction with the Hip-Hop Dance Club at our school (which happened spontaneously at the talent show), and when (if?) warm weather finally comes, we'll go for a little parade after school.

The biggest way is that we draw from an incredibly diverse student body (I mean, it's a public school in Cambridge).

So far, I haven't turned anyone away from playing with us, so I can't say we have a socially conscious policy for admitting new members, but I have tried to reach out to women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people first in forming the band. So far, we have a good gender balance, and decent LGBTQ+ representation, with some people of color, although I won't pretend we have done well in terms of racial diversity. We are working on that, however, and I have planned to add several new members in the coming weeks (partially in preparation for replacing graduating seniors), and I'm hoping this will increase our racial diversity.
All of that said, it is worth noting that we are still more racially diverse than many honk bands I have seen performing in past years; my main point in the above paragraph is really that given the diversity of our student body, we should really have more people of color in our band.

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