Early entrants to Spring Weekend 2025 were greeted by a curious sight: a brass band hefting sousaphones and trombones, dancing and playing a 45-minute set on the lawn, rousing attendees with their high-energy music. The group has been a recent staple of Spring Weekend, making appearances at all but one of the last 13 annual concerts.
But who exactly is the Undertow Brass Band?
According to tuba player Daniel Schleifer ’03, it’s a group originally formed with a simple goal: to make music without electricity.
“We were a bunch of friends who found ourselves really compelled by the idea of creating a band that could play really loud, really fun music without having to rely on electricity,” Schleifer said, adding that the band got its start in 2005.
Schleifer cited the excitement of being physically untethered while playing music as one reason why the Undertow Brass Band relies solely on their instruments. Their freestanding musical performances allow them to take their music anywhere.
“Part of our band’s identity is that we frequently perform at rallies and protests,” Schleifer said. “That was part of the earliest vision of the band: It’s going to be a fun party band, but this is another aspect of what we can do — make ourselves available to social movements when needed to make some noise.”
Many members of the original group were Brown alums, including Schleifer. He recalled his own memories of Spring Weekend, including seeing rapper Wyclef Jean perform live in 2000.
Now, the band’s annual Spring Weekend appearance has become a season-opening gig for them at the start of their musical performance cycle.
“It feels like a little bit of a homecoming,” Schleifer said. “Since it falls, like, mid-April, it’s kind of our first big show of our season.”
The Undertow Brass Band draws their inspiration from a variety of musical traditions, including music from the Balkans, New Orleans sound, Brazilian samba and even electronic dance music. Since their music doesn’t rely on spoken language, they’ve worked to connect with audiences without saying a word, Schleifer added.
“A lot of these musical traditions that we’ve named can be considered folk traditions, and in many cases, living traditions,” he said. “There are moments where I feel like we come close to … entering a place of shared revelry amongst ourselves and the audience.”
The group’s social media reveals a wide catalogue of performances, repertoire and venues. For Schleifer, the band is constantly working to perfect a living element to their music: shifting depending on the circumstances, but more often than not, moving an entire crowd to their feet.
The musical group has undergone numerous transformations over the years. This includes a name change from What Cheer? Brigade, which once signified the band’s roots within local Providence culture.
The band first picked the name “without fully understanding the history” of the phrase, Schleifer shared. “What cheer?” is featured on Providence’s official seal. The phrase is a reference to local mythos, in which the Narragansett welcomed Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, by saying “What cheer, netop?”
Schleifer explained that “the whole mythos around ‘what cheer?’ is harmful in that it erases the true history of colonialism here, so we wanted to get away from celebrating that history,” he said. Soon after, the Undertow Brass Band was born.
“As for ‘Undertow,’ I guess we just liked how it sounded,” Schleifer added.
For most of the band’s members, who all have day jobs outside of making music, the Undertow Brass Band is a creative project. Schleifer is currently pursuing further education, but prior to that, he was the executive director of New Urban Arts, a youth after-school organization in Providence. Like Schleifer, many of the band members work in the nonprofit sector and come together to make music that they’re passionate about, he said.
“I think sometimes it would actually be easier in a bigger city and a bigger market,” Schleifer said. But “there’s a kind of intimacy of being a band in a small town where not all the musicians in the band are gonna have some other gig that they have to go to on any given night.”
Above all, Schleifer said, the group is just trying to have a good time.
“It feels like we’re still always figuring it out … ultimately (the Undertow Brass Band) is an amateur project in a fundamental way and we’re not making money off of it,” Schleifer said.
“It’s those moments where you’re simultaneously incredibly focused and also collectively lost in the music that are so rewarding,” he added.
Alyssia Ouhocine is a Senior Staff Writer covering Arts & Culture. Hailing from Bayonne, New Jersey, she is concentrating in English and History with a particular interest in Algerian history and literature. When she’s not writing, she can be found listening to music and sending Google Calendar invites.
