Brass Covers Everything, Even Haddaway

The Jägermeister Blaskapelle—a brass band commissioned by and named after the German herbal liqueur, because corporate music projects are a thing—released an album in 2014 called Move Your Brass! built on an idea simple enough to work: take songs from hip-hop, pop, and techno, strip them of everything electronic, and play them straight with a full brass ensemble. The results were, depending on your tolerance for the premise, either charming or maddening, probably both at once.

The record release party was at the Teppichfabrik Alt-Stralau, a former carpet factory on a quiet peninsula in eastern Berlin that had become a reliable venue for events that wanted crumbling industrial ruin to do some of the atmospheric heavy lifting. The lineup brought in artists who’d appeared on the album: Alligatoah, MC Fitti, Jennifer Rostock, Das Bo, Die Atzen, and Haddaway—the man behind What Is Love, who showed up to perform alongside a brass arrangement of his own song, which is either the most self-aware thing possible or the least, depending on your reading of the situation.

Haddaway was always the best argument for the premise. What Is Love survives almost any arrangement—it’s built on a melodic hook so persistent it would hold up on kazoo. The hip-hop and techno covers were the more interesting test cases, where the genre translation had more to lose. Brass instrumentation exposes what a song actually is once you take away the production: sometimes it’s a melody, sometimes it’s just a rhythm, and sometimes it turns out there wasn’t much there to begin with. The party itself happened. The night was probably fine.