Until we met our friends Lori Barian and Lance Landquist for lunch at their cozy Greenbank home last week, I had not heard of the HONK! street band phenomenon. Lance plays trumpet for SOUND MACHINE, a HONK! genre band part of a growing international community. He mentioned he’d be performing at the September 15 Soup Box Derby in Langley.
HONK! brass and drum street bands got their start in 2006 in Somerville, Massachusettes, where the annual HONK! Fest continues to take place. The idea has spread internationally with the formation of community bands such as our own SOUND MACHINE.
Impressed with HONK! inspired bands he played with in Seattle, David Stern founded SOUND MACHINE last year. The band rehearses Tuesday nights at the Whidbey Island Fairgrounds and Event Center.
I spoke with David a day after SOUND MACHINE performed for the annual Soup Box Derby in Langley on Sept. 15.
“We’ve been lucky to participate in HONK! festivals,” David said. “There’s HONK! bands and HONK! festivals. In June we went to Seattle for HONK! Fest West, which has been happening for about 15 years. I helped start it back in 2008 when I lived in Seattle. We were in HONK! Tacoma the past weekend.”
While street music has long existed—take New Orleans brass bands, for instance, whose beat gets the crowd dancing and moving at parades, weddings and funerals–most street music faded from popularity in modern times as cities and communities formed their own bands and orchestras.
“The 2006 HONK! Fest was a way to reclaim public space,” Stern added. “Parks, parking lots, town squares, that sort of thing. It’s really taken off and spread. What separates HONK! bands is their community activism. Some players risk arrests playing at protests. Other bands donate money they’ve earned from the gigs they play.”
David found the appeal of playing music for a cause, recalling his participation with the Infernal Noise Brigade—which performed from 1999 through 2006. It was founded in response to the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting protests in 1999. Protesters then numbered 40,000-plus.
“To mobilize crowds they needed music and I joined about a year after it founded,” he recalled. “I was part of that group for a long time—really fun. I never got arrested. I was lucky.”
When the band broke up, David started a similar band, “a little more party-based, that lasted about five years, and based in Seattle…After that, I joined the Seahawks Blue Thunder drum line, and played for three years.”
After moving to Whidbey Island with his wife Madisun Elizabeth, there was a gap in David’s involvement with street bands until 2015.
“We produced the Brass Band Picnic in Greenbank in 2015,” he recalled. “Years later, we hosted our second annual Brass Band Picnic.”
Madisun, he says, is the band’s front woman, dressing in costume, twirling her parasol, inviting those gathered to dance, and collecting donations for the band’s performances.
“The spectacle plays a big part,” David said. His own band members wear eye-catching costumes. “HONK! in Seattle has a neon brass band, and its people wear neon. Some wear all black. Ours is red and black, and people come up with fun stuff. Everyone in the group has great community connections.”
Age groups with the Whidbey Island Sound Machine range from little kids to senior citizens, David added. “It’s for everyone. We’ve found some great people so far. We welcome new members.”
More than half the band is a core group from the Whidbey Island Orchestra. The others joined to be part of a fun group.
How did SOUND MACHINE get its name?
“The inspiration for the name came from a drum class I was a part of,” David recalled. “At the end of class, we would dump a bucket of instruments on the ground for everyone to grab and play. That part of the class was called ‘sound machine.’ The onomatopoetic sound of the bucket being poured out and instruments clanging to the ground tickled my senses. The other inspirations came from the idea of us being a little engine, or machine, pumping out community music. Just don’t confuse us for the Miami Sound Machine because Gloria Estefan isn’t coming!”
Check out SOUND MACHINE’s upcoming performances at an autumn festival sponsored by the Freeland Library, Saturday, Sept. 21 from 11 AM to 1 PM. And they will be playing at the annual Black Cat Ball Oct. 26 at Bayview Hall.
For more information, contact David Stern at whidbeyevents@gmail.com