- Reuben Atlas
- Hypnotic Brass Ensemble performing at the Shrine
On Monday night at 10 PM, WTTW will screen Reuben Atlas’s Brothers Hypnotic, a lively, music-soaked documentary about the Chicago-bred Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. The group, which moved to New York in 2006, consists of eight sons fathered by trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and visionary Phil Cohran—an early member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, a cofounder of the AACM, and the man behind the Affro-Arts Theater. The music his Artistic Heritage Ensemble created in the late 60s exerted a huge influence on Chicago musicians, including the Pharaohs, Kahil El’Zabar, and Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White. In 2003 I profiled the ensemble, whose members learned to play brass instruments during rigorous group lessons conducted by their father every morning before they headed to school. There’s some incredible footage of his sons performing with him when they were part of the Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble.
Still, the final part of the film features footage shot at the recording session for the 2012 record Cohran and his sons made together—arguably the finest work yet from the Hypnotics—where they both do their best to bridge the generational and stylistic gaps that exist. The version of the documentary screening next week as part of the PBS series Independent Lens is 53 minutes long, about a half hour shorter than the theatrical version of the film that’s been showing at film festivals over the last year, and while the arc of the narrative and its techniques are pretty conventional, the charisma of the subjects, especially Cohran, is compelling enough to eclipse that lack of verve.
