It’s a different kind of foundation completely, the one that Brasstracks offer their accompanying artists. The New York duo – deep into their career at this point, though fresh on the heels of their official debut album release – lay rails unlike any other productive or instrumental backdrop in music. And in turn, they get something new from their friends. They evoke art through a challenge; they change the game through their art. And through a deep-seeded knowledge of their own music and that of others, they recruit features in force, fully aware what it is that each artist can offer; fully capable in conjuring collaborative fluidity.

 

With Brasstracks’ fourth project at length, and what is technically their debut album, fourteen artists received their Golden Ticket to join the jam; invited to a funk-heavy experimental house party, sweeter and more addictingly sticky than Wonka confections. Some you may know – some you certainly do – and others you may not, but the names included alone speak to the rangy breadth attempted and successfully gapped by Brasstracks with Golden Ticket.

 

But stylistic range aside, there is also an obvious nod to the duo’s introduction to one another. Deeply unmotivated by conservatory music school monotony, Brasstracks were founded to bring some more bounce and creative input to their own lives, while bringing some more timeless instrumentation to the oft monotonous lens of soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop rooted modernity. Their grey area quickly turned clear as an audience seemingly starved of jazz’s frontal positioning in the genres that were birthed from it hopped on board. And with that audience, so too came featuring acts. And now, comes Golden Ticket.

 

45 minutes of fluctuating stylistic positioning and indefinable collaborations amalgamate beneath a simplistic banner sewn of unendingly upbeat trumpet and drum. And out from there, the rest of Golden Ticket takes expansive shape. Moment to moment, that shape is one defined more by what each track’s featuring artist is capable of doing with a Brasstracks space, than by Brasstracks themselves.

 

And that’s because, once in an experimental space that an artist has never been able to exist in under the pressures of the contemporary scene, artists flourish, experiment, and create vivid newness with each track invented into existence by the jazzy soul of Brasstracks at their core.