Perceptive Travel World Music Reviews

July 2012 - By Graham Reid

Safety Fifth Mucca Pazza

We say: Warning: marching band, Spike Jones, and tango orchestra in multiple pile-up. No one hurt.

What with the funky lineage out of New Orleans, the woozy sound of the late Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and the likes of the free-wheeling Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the ground has been well prepared for this big band (like HBE, from Chicago). These heretics throw funk, rock, avant-garde jazz, imagined movie themes, a smattering of world music (tango in the house!) and a dozen different instruments into the blender to produce genre-defying good time music which will redefine career possibilities for any kid in a high school marching band.

Whimsical but quirky, energetic and often mad, Mucca Pazza also have a sensitive side (the stately sound of "Last Days" set in a 19th century parlor in Buenos Aires), although they seem happier to drag you off to a guitar-twanging spaghetti-western bullfight with mariachi trumpets ("Sexy Bull"). And "Hang 'Em Where I Can See 'Em" sounds like an offcut from a moody scene in "Citizen Kane" while "Coolashell" is a drum-driven digression paving the way for the self explanatory "Maui Waui 5-0".

Fun for all the family and a mash-up of hyphenated styles to take you away from these troubled times. World music for this increasingly strange planet.