2012 Rat City Brass at Lopez Center

Published 9:06 am Thursday, April 26, 2012

By Karalynn Ott

Special to Islands’ Weekly

Can you think of a better way to kick off Tour de Lopez weekend than to warm up your spirit – and your bicycling muscles – with the sunshiny sound of some south-of-the-border tunes? If you can’t, then you’re in luck because Seattle’s Rat City Brass will be playing on Lopez on the tour’s eve, Friday, April 27, 7:30 p.m., at Lopez Center for Community and the Arts. And as some may know, the band is very fond of playing just such Latin-tinged music.

Rat City Brass – or RCB, for short – is excited to be playing this weekend, hoping that riders and non-riders alike will come to Friday night’s all-ages performance. “With all the dancing we typically see out in front of us,” said trumpeter Sean McGee. “Hopefully the riders will still have some energy left for the bike ride in the morning.”

The eight-piece band started out a few years ago mainly playing Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass classics. Their repertoire now includes dozens of their own spicy yet playful arrangements of infectious melodies by mid-century instrumental masters like Burt Bacharach and Henry Mancini, as well as pop songs by The Beatles and The Turtles. The sets are still sprinkled generously with TJB favorites too.

This will be the third time RCB has played on Lopez, and they hope their at-once familiar and refreshing sound is catching on with islanders like Barbara Fulton and her husband Ralph Bladt, who have been to see RCB a few times, even out of state.

“It’s such a fun performance everyone will enjoy,” Fulton said. “We liked RCB so much we traveled to Oregon to see them – and now they are here.”

Bladt enjoys “…the wall of sound you get with some of RCB’s songs, like ‘Third Man Theme’ [one of band’s show-stoppers].”

KLOI disc jockey Gary Alexander came to hear RCB on Lopez previously, and he plans to be there Friday night too.

“Who would have thought that a trumpet-led Mariachi-sound would strike such a resonant chord throughout America?” he said. “But it did. This music appeals to all ages. I love to see kids dancing to the same music their grandparents liked. Young and old came together in the 1960s on precious little, but the Tijuana Brass bridged the generation gap like no other music did. And this music still ‘feels’ wgood.”

McGee, the trumpeter, is personally quite familiar with the island, and many Lopezians. And he suspects he knows why they love the Tijuana dance sound.

“Isn’t Lopez the Latin enclave of the San Juans anyway?” he said with a grin.

Joking aside, McGee is thrilled to be playing on the island again. “I’ve been coming to Lopez for years to visit friends,” he said. “But now that I get to come here and share this music with such an appreciative crowd, Lopez has a very special place in my heart.”

Rat City Brass plays at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 27 at Lopez Center. Tickets: (adults $15 at the door; $5 youth; special senior, 62-plus ticket price of $13 at the door may be purchased t www.lopezcenter.org, at Lopez Community and the Arts, and other village outlets, or at the door.