The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is thrilled to welcome the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the eight-piece, Chicago-based brass ensemble consisting of eight sons of the jazz trumpeter Phil Cohran. Their musical style ranges from hip-hop to jazz to funk and rock, including calypso and gypsy music and Guinness Cork Jazz Festival audiences are in for the ultimate party-set to have everyone dancing away to the Bad Boys of the Jazz World!

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble who take their stylistic cues from jazz, funk, hip-hop, and various strains of world music — started out playing on the streets of Chicago, New York, and elsewhere, selling their self-released CDs and gradually building a loyal following and an international profile. The youngest of some 23 children — the offspring of different mothers, but all sons of jazz trumpeter and composer Kelan Phil Cohran (a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) — Gabriel Hubert (trumpet), Tycho Cohran (sousaphone), Amal Hubert (trumpet), Uttama Hubert (euphonium), Saiph Graves (trombone), Jafar Graves (trumpet), Seba Graves (trombone), and Tarik Graves (trumpet) all grew up together in Chicago, watching their father rehearse with his band Circle of Sound, playing together in the Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble, and later writing rhymes as the rap group Wolf Pak.

Following the 1996 death of one of their older brothers, which shook up the family and prompted some of its farther-flung members to return to their hometown, the brothers, then mostly in their teens, began to coalesce into a more focused and business-oriented group. They started setting up around Chicago’s streets and El stations to perform their original, collectively developed compositions, which call to mind the sound of traditional New Orleans big-band jazz and nod to the avant-garde angularity of their father and his contemporaries, but are equally informed by the rhythmic drive and accessible simplicity of hip-hop. Later they began recording and self-releasing CD-Rs, beginning with 2004’s Flipside (aka Orange) and 2005’s Jupiter (Green) — the band’s early releases all feature the same cover photograph and eponymous title, so they’re referred to by the color of their sleeves and the names of key tracks — which eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies entirely through self-promotion.