United Press International

BONERAMA BITES BIG APPLE >From the Life & Mind Desk (Independent)

Rock News: Music's high and low notes • Published 11/18/2002 3:00 AM

Bonerama, the innovative trombone band led by one of New Orleans' brightest young stars, Mark Mullins, made its New York debut before a packed house at Tobacco Road Saturday. Mullins, a brilliant trombonist and arranger, also is a member of Harry Connick Jr.'s big band, and he's taken some performance cues from his charismatic boss. Mullins was poised and confident as he led his lineup of four trombones, tuba, guitar and drums through a set that lasted well over three hours and kept the dancing, cheering crowd in the room until the very end.

Mullins' brass arrangements are nothing short of brilliant, the most innovative approach since Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears came up with new strategies in the late 1960s. Songs like the Eagles' "The Long Run" open up in this context, thanks to the front line's ability to alternately blast in unison, like a rock band, and play four or five lines in funky counterpoint, like some New Orleans outpost of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Mullins straddles pop and jazz as a conceptualist, and one of his biggest influences is rock guitar innovator Jimi Hendrix.

A great open-tone trombone player, Mullins also is the most accomplished electric 'bone player in the business, and when he takes a wah-wah solo it often sounds like a guitar. Versions of the Hendrix classics "Foxy Lady" and "Crosstown Traffic" offered great examples of this technique, as did the set-closing version of Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein."

Big Easy jam-funk superstars Galactic, who played to a sold-out audience at Hammerstein Ballroom earlier that night, dropped in to jam. Drummer Stanton Moore sat in on "Foxy Lady," and vocalist Theryl "Houseman" deClouet took over for the New Orleans funk classics "Just Kissed My Baby" and "Big Chief." Other guests also chipped in -- at one point there were six trombones going at once after Tom Lonegan from the Flying Neutrinos and Dan Levine joined in.

by John Swenson