Revolutionary Snake Ensemble

If you live in the Boston area and you’re jonesing for a shot of brass-powered jazz, funk and New Orleans street rhythms, you could always make the 1,500-mile trek south to The Big Easy, where you’ll find any number of extraordinary bands to whet your whistle. That said, if you lack the time, budget or energy for such a long journey, there’s a simpler, much cheaper solution that’ll give you just the fix you need: catch Boston-based Revolutionary Snake Ensemble at one of their gigs in and around the city. As anyone remotely familiar with the internationally acclaimed sextet will attest, seeing them live or listening to their albums is like being beamed up to Bourbon Street regardless of your location, be it New England, New Brunswick, New Zealand or New Delhi.

RSE’s repertoire is as unique as any horn-driven band’s has ever been, ranging from hymns, spirituals and traditional New Orleans parade anthems to tunes by Ornette Coleman, James Brown and Billy Idol, and members’ stage attire is equally offbeat, evoking the flashy capes and headdresses of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and the feathered-and-metallic look of the Mardi Gras Indians. The group has had a revolving lineup of up-and-coming and well-established players, making it a workshop of sorts for younger cats, but improvisation has always been an essential element. “The arrangements are usually spontaneous, decided by me on stage based on the group vibe and on my vibe at the moment,” says RSE’s founder/leader Ken Field, noting that “not having a chording instrument in the band allows for tremendous freedom on the part of the horn players.”

The ensemble has appeared at well-known venues and festivals around New England, the greater US and Europe, recorded five albums and been nominated twice for New England Music Awards. Among the heaps of glowing reviews and attempts to describe their sound that have been written over the past several decades, New Orleans-based magazine OffBeat summed up the group’s quirky combination of long-held tradition and avant-garde innovation as succinctly and accurately as could be: “Most bands can’t get the New Orleans stuff right, but Revolutionary Snake Ensemble is one of the few who does and then takes it in fascinating directions.”

FORMATION, PAST MEMBERS, CURRENT LINEUP

The group formed in 1990, spearheaded by saxophonist-flautist-composer Field, a Red Bank, New Jersey native (like Count Basie) who relocated to Providence, Rhode Island in 1970 to attend Brown University, He moved to Boston in ‘77, spent the next two years studying at Berklee College of Music and in 1988, after working on solo projects and with various other artists and bands, joined the Moving Parts and Mission of Burma offshoot Birdsongs of the Mesozoic; he remains in the group to this day.

In 1990, he and trumpeter-cartoonist Scott Getchell formed an improvisational horn-and-percussion group as part of a pagan women’s ritual celebration, with no intention of continuing the band beyond that one event. The response was so overwhelmingly positive, however, that the pair chose to continue, seeing it as a creative outlet for the Boston/Cambridge area’s bevy of uber-skilled free-improv players. When Getchell moved on to other projects, Field started writing original material for the new ensemble and setting relatively obscure tunes by Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, John Scofield and others to New Orleans-style street grooves.

A short list of former RSE members testifies to the band’s extraordinary level of musicianship; it includes saxophonists Russ Gershon (Either/Orchestra) and Dana Colley (Morphine), bassists Jesse Williams (Al Kooper, Duke Robillard) and Kimon Kirk (Aimee Mann, Session Americana) and percussionist Ken Winokur (Alloy Orchestra), among many other top players. Guests at concerts and/or on recordings have included saxophonists Matt Darriau, Goodwin Lewis and the late Charles Neville; trombonists Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and Josh Roseman; trumpeter Jason Palmer; and drummers Brian Richburg Jr. and Kenny Wollesen.

Since 2015, RSE’s lineup has been Field, who hosts the weekly radio show The New Edge on WMBR in Cambridge and WOMR in Provincetown and is president of the board at JazzBoston; saxophonist Tom Hall, an instructor at Brandeis and MIT, the author of Free Improvisation: A Practical Guide and the creator/host of the YouTube series ImprovLive 365; trombonist-tubist David Harris, a professor in Berklee’s Harmony Department who also performs with the Jazz Composers Alliance; drummer Phil Neighbors, who’s played with groups including Dave Birkin’s Hot Shots and The Funky White Honkies; bassist Blake Newman, who’s performed and/or recorded with Evan Ziporyn, Quincy Troupe and Ran Blake, among others; and trumpeter Jerry Sabatini, who has a master’s from New England Conservatory, has played in bands including The Makanda Project, Charlie Kohlhase’s Explorers Club and Eric Hofbauer’s Prehistoric Jazz Ensemble and directs a big band based at Groton Hill Music Center.

YEAR OF THE SNAKE, MARDI GRAS PARADES

In 2003, more than a dozen years after RSE came together, Innova Recordings released the band’s nine-track debut album, Year of the Snake, which includes three Field originals and covers of songs by Sun Ra (“A Call for All Demons”), John Scofield (“Some Nerve”) and James Brown (“Soul Power”); it was listed as one of the top LPs of the year on New York City’s WNYC and Radio Poplare in Milan, Italy and in the New Orleans-based alternative paper Gambit Weekly. The album drew so much national attention that RSE was invited to play at Mardi Gras in New Orleans the very next year. From 2005 to 2009, under special arrangement with Amtrak, the band traveled from Boston to New Orleans on the Amtrak Crescent, performing on the train during the 36-hour trip before marching with the Krewe of Muses in their annual Mardi Gras parade upon arrival.

“We would get down there, play a little party, and people assumed we were from New Orleans, and that meant a lot to us,” says Field. “At the same time, we were doing something different. It gave us the experience of meeting and playing with some New Orleans musicians, and they always encouraged us to keep doing our own thing.” And that’s exactly what RSE did, as heard on their second studio outing, 2008’s Forked Tongue, issued by Cuneiform Records. The disc spent two months on the CMJ’s North American Jazz Top 20 chart, peaking at #11, and appeared on Best of 2008 lists in The Village Voice, multiple other publications across the US and in countries as far afield as Estonia. In one of the group’s more daring ventures into the completely unexpected, the album includes a cover of Billy Idol’s 1982 hit “White Wedding.”

In 2014, Accurate Records released RSE’s third album, Live Snakes, which they recorded in 2011 and 2013 in Boston, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. The group played special CD release shows at Regattabar in Cambridge, Barbes in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; within two weeks of its release, the album cracked the top 10 on the CMJ’s North American Jazz Top 20 chart and DownBeat magazine made it an Editor’s Pick. RSE’s fourth LP, I Want That Sound! (Innova, 2016), which The Boston Globe referred to as “explosive,” also made it into CMJ’s top 10 within two weeks of its release and saw effusive reviews. “I Want That Sound! is a strong example of how Ken Field and the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble continue to push the brass band tradition forward in an entirely original way, all the while making music that’s a heck of a lot of fun,” said The New York City Jazz Record, while The Boston Herald lauded the group for continuing explore “the wild outerlands of jazz.”

RSE’s fifth and most recent album is the 11-track Serpentine, which includes eight Field originals, was recorded live at Regattabar in 2024 and issued by Cuneiform Records in September 2025. As usual, Field changed arrangements on the spot regularly throughout the show. “I told the guys, ‘Don’t worry about the fact that we’re recording,’” he says. “‘Don’t hold back. Take chances.’ Jazz is an experimental form. If you do the same thing every night, then you’re not doing jazz right, in my opinion.” Unsurprisingly given RSE’s track record with critics, the LP received unanimously positive reviews, with New Orleans Jazz Museum curator and host of WWOZ’s Freaknologist Lunatique David Kunian predicting that it would draw jazz fans from across generations.

“All hail the mighty Revolutionary Snake Ensemble. They have blessed us with another great record of jazz that you have to dance to, but without losing the complexity and sophistication of the music itself,” he said. “There’s some Sun Ra, some New Orleans second line, some Afrobeat, some Zappa [“Son of Mr. Green Genes”] and other mystical ingredients that combine into a musical spell that will envelop the listener. This is jazz for young and old and new and veteran.”

NOTABLE APPEARANCES, SESAME STREET “PARADE OF NUMBERS”

RSE has performed at a wide variety of venues/events in and around Boston, among them the Berklee Performance Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Scullers Jazz Club, ONCE Ballroom, The Crystal Ballroom, The Lizard Lounge, the Central Square World’s Fair, the Cambridge River Festival, the Greenway ARTbeat Series and Wellfleet Preservation Hall, and appeared at First Nights in Boston, Fall River and Providence. Beyond their backyard, they’ve taken the stage at the UFO Festival in Roswell, New Mexico; the Festival of Redentore in Venice, Italy; Tonic, The Stone and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City; and Tipitina’s, one of the most historic venues in New Orleans. In 1994, Field composed and RSE performed the music for the recurring “Parade of Numbers” segment on the TV show Sesame Street.

Asked for his reflections on RSE now that the band’s been together for north of 35 years, Field said he’s “thrilled with the evolution of the group,” noting how fortunate he’s been to work with such exceptional players and share his hybrid compositions and arrangements with what’s become a sizable audience. “It’s been a great honor to play with such amazing and creative musicians over the years and to have had a consistent personnel of friends and brilliant collaborators for the past decade,” he said. “We’re super lucky to be able to forge this improvisational music, steeped in the great tradition of New Orleans brass bands and second line groups, but hopefully extending that tradition in new ways. We love that people appreciate and enjoy what we do, and we love the characterization by noted New York City musician Matt Darriau: our music is ‘fun yet deep!’”

(by D.S. Monahan)