Brass Mash Member Deep Dive: Colin Dean
The man behind the curtain
“Here is the man…here is the man…” Tim, holding the mic, pauses briefly, then continues with some wild rap about our bandleader, Colin Dean. This is how I think of Colin’s introduction at the end of our shows - it is absurd, and so is this whole thing. If you are reading this blog, you have probably experienced a Brass Mash performance, and we all have Colin to thank for that.
Here is the man…who does so much that we see and even more that we don’t see. Part of this blog’s purpose is to show some of the inner workings of Brass Mash, including stories of how we got to this point. In this post, I hope you enjoy learning a little about our fearless leader, starting up a band, and early Brass Mash experiences.
Current favorite Mashup:
My favorite mashup is always the new mashups! If we’ve been playing the song for six months, I’m bored already. My new favorite mashup is “Fireflies of Summer.” I did a bold thing at the last gig - I put it in the prime location of the whole show, which is the third or fourth song of the third set. It was like, “Either the song is going to absolutely slay and everyone will sing along; or everyone will hate the song, Brass Mash will be ruined, and we’ll never play music again.”
I wanted it there because I wanted a guaranteed singalong. I wanted to see if everyone was going to sing along to this moment, and sure enough, they did. It was a setlist miracle!
What gave you the idea to start a mashup band?
I totally stole it. About ten years ago, I started hearing about mashup bands in New York. A bunch of years ago, I joined the group called East Bay Brass Band, which is run out of Oakland. They happened to be an all-brass band that also does mashups! I started writing for them because I like the format - there are all these angles to doing mashups, it’s pretty fun. Playing one song at a time is actually pretty boring.
It was time for me and my wife to leave our jobs - we were working at this high school. I was working with East Bay Brass Band and having a great time, and we were going to move down to San Luis Obispo. So I started doing my research - I wondered if there was another brass band around here, and there was not. I liked the mashups, and I thought, maybe I should just continue this brass band mashup idea, and just bring that idea over to SLO. I used to live down here and play with bands. I knew it was just going to murder and people would love it. I just needed to find people to play with.
So yeah, the idea was totally stolen.
What was the first Brass Mash rehearsal like?
It was me, Brett, and a very early drummer, Aaron. It was essentially me trying to do Bangamahab with everyone. Brett was on tuba, and I was on trombone. A lot of these really early songs, instead of having saxophones and trumpets and trombones, I would just play everything. So I would have to get everyone learning their parts, and I would have to play all of the melody lines until everyone else learned them.
I’m so appreciative that we have more than 3 players now so I don’t have to play the entire time. It was exhausting, and it just ended in frustration because it was obvious we didn’t have enough people. We were doing rehearsals to start this thing, but we didn’t have all the parts. It was like going camping without a sleeping bag - it didn’t make sense. But we were there and we kept doing it.
I knew, if I could get just a couple of players, and we could get everyone at the Frog and Peach, that we would be fine. The problem was talking to people - I would just sound like a mad man. I specifically have a really good friend who, when I was talking about Brass Mash, was like “I don’t know if this is going to work.” Like, it was so out of left field and it was ambitious. I was the only one who understood it because I was the only one who knew about East Bay Brass Band.
It’s just crazy enough that people don’t quite know if it’s going to work. It was really Brett and Sean, early on, who were willing to stick with it. There’s been hesitation with them over the years, too.
What have you learned about running a band?
I actually wasn’t sure if I could do it. Coming from these other groups - I realized I’d have to bring lead singer energy and I’d never been in that role. I wasn’t really sure if anyone would care. Boy, I’ve come a long way in nine years. Now, when people talk about when I’m charismatic on stage, I’m just doing my thing - I don’t think about it that much.
Believing in yourself - Maybe it’s because the things that I sounded so crazy about were right. It seems to be the right choice so far. I make all sorts of bad decisions, and I’ve come to accept those. That’s probably the most I’ve learned about being a band leader - believing in my ideas, and letting the proof be the right show. Sometimes that takes awhile.
Describe one core Brass Mash experience.
It was 2017 and they had given us this Thursday night at SLO Brew, which was downtown on Higuera. It was a weird room, we were still figuring things out. We had a ton of players - I think we had 12 players on stage. Half the people knew the parts, half the people were just winging it and playing the high notes.
Things just all of a sudden made sense. People were cheering for the solos, dancing along, shouting out. It was wild. It was something we’re used to now. Now we know how to prompt it, but then I didn’t know how to prompt those things and it felt awful.
We played “Bad Living,” and I realized that we’d switched to the song “Bad Romance,” but everyone was singing “Living on a Prayer.” I didn’t know how to feel about it at that moment. It took me until right after that gig when I realized…”Oh. The audience sings the mashup.”
That’s what the gag is. The band takes a hard left turn and plays “Bad Romance,” and the audience sings “Living on a Prayer.” This is the magic sauce. Actually, the band doesn’t have to do the mashup. The mashup can happen inside of the audience, and the audience is this element that we can mess with. That’s my core memory - playing that, being slightly disappointed, but then having this realization.
