Today is Fat Tuesday — also known as Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday — which marks the end of Carnival and the beginning of Lent, a solemn period observed by many Christians during the 40 days leading up to Easter.
If you’re not in New Orleans — where Mardi Gras marks the end of weeks of parades and festivities — and you’re looking for a Jewish spin on this festive but decidedly non-Jewish tradition, you could roll up your sleeves and bake a king cake challah. Or you could simply head on over to the Broadway Brass Band’s YouTube or Instagram pages.
There, you’ll find upbeat, New Orleans Big Band-style versions of Broadway classics, like “If I Were a Rich Man” from “Fiddler on the Roof” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Climb Every Mountain” from “The Sound of Music,” featuring Jewish musician and songwriter Benny Lipson on tuba. And trumpet. And vocals.
With his one-man Broadway Brass Band, the Los Angeles-based musician, 33, makes “funky brassy arrangements of music from your favorite Broadway shows… and beyond,” according to his social media. Lipson’s penchant for musical theater runs in the family: Lipson, along with his twin brother, Jack, who’s also a musician, spent the first few months of their lives traversing the country with their mother, Valerie, who played Eva Perón in the national tour of “Evita.”
“I get a lot of joy exploring these songs, rearranging the songs,” Lipson told the New York Jewish Week on Monday, shortly after landing in New York to visit his brother. “It’s not like I’m rewriting the song or anything, but I’m adding four lines [improv] that everybody can sing together, and using that to connect the styles of the New Orleans brass band and musical theater.”
A full-time professional musician who has performed at the Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl and Disney Hall, as well as Club Cumming in the East Village, Lipson’s credits also include stints as a song leader at a Jewish summer camp. With the Broadway Brass Band — which occasionally features a guest musician from his circle of talented friends — Lipson hopes to combat what he sees as “cultural suppression” surrounding the fondness for musical theater within the artsy, avant-garde set.
“I love musical theater,” Lipson said. “I’ve never been cowardly about that. But to be putting it online as frequently as I do, that’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I love theater songs and I love the style,’ I think it’s invited some other friends to be like, ‘Oh, wait, we actually found a way to make this kind of cool and approachable.’”
Lipson said he finds a lot of inspiration from many of the Jewish Broadway songwriter greats, like Frank Loesser (“Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”), John Kander and Fred Ebb (“Cabaret,” “Chicago,” “New York, New York”), Jerry Herman (“Hello Dolly,” “La Cage aux Folles”) and Sheldon Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof”).
Right now, Lipson said, “Cabaret” is his favorite Broadway show.
“It’s so good, especially in what we’re experiencing today, with such an uptick in antisemitism,” said Lipson, who saw the musical in July. (Coincidentally, his mother is currently in a local run of the show in Thousand Oaks, California.)
“You just go to the theater for two and a half hours, and you can really just synthesize what it was like turning from 1929 to 1930 in Berlin, and it doesn’t beat you over the head or anything like that,” he said of “Cabaret.”
A seasoned upright bass player, Lipson got into brass during the COVID-19 lockdown, when he reacquainted himself with a trombone he had bought from a thrift store years earlier. Then, he bought a tuba from Craigslist, and he realized he was onto something.
“When I would just pick up the trombone randomly in practice, I often had the “Do You Hear the People Sing” melody [from “Les Misérables”]. It just worked nicely on the horn,” Lipson said.
In addition to the song being easy to practice as a novice trombone player, he liked the song’s lyrics about resistance to power, and found that it complements the brass band style, which is highly mobile and doesn’t require being plugged into amps.
“The brass band is sort of similar to the klezmer band, in a way,” said Lipson, who grew up Reform. “Certainly, the live, improvisational element is similar to that of klezmer music. So I am going to be doing that with the brass band.”
Lipson works as a song leader at a Los Angeles synagogue several times a month, and he said he frequently hosts Shabbat dinners with friends, Jewish and not, where he likes to maintain focus on how fortunate the Jewish people are in the present.
“It’s just something that we can’t take for granted, because, as we know, studying our history, it goes away instantly sometimes,” Lipson said. “So I feel passionate about continuing that.”
While he has a few specifically Jewish songs on the Broadway Brass Band playlist — “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” by Jewish songwriter Tom Lehrer being one his most-watched videos so far, though it’s notably not a Broadway tune — Lipson said his aim with the Broadway Brass Band is to celebrate musical theater.
Asked whether he sees himself as part of the lineage of Jewish Broadway greats, Lipson said yes — and no.
“The truest form of the art, in theater, is putting it all together,” he said. “I would like to insert myself into this theater history timeline. But, I mean, I also would like to do that as a composer for the stage.”
Right now, he added, “I’m loving this. And because I love playing brass, and I love this style of musical theater, this has been perfect.”
Catch Benny Lipson at Mona’s Bar (224 Ave. B, Unit 14) where he’ll be part of the Mardi Gras second line, Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at 9 p.m.
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