Alsa Bruno ’12 and the Soundtrack for Community
As the sun starts dipping toward the horizon one afternoon in late January, hundreds of people make their way to frozen Lake Nokomis, a few miles from the site where Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents a week earlier. They carry paper-bag lanterns, ice luminaria, and candles to light up two football field–sized words formed on the lake’s surface with snow: “ICE OUT.” A trumpet sounds, and the crowd, shivering in the winter chill, circles up around a brass band. With trumpets, drums, sousaphones, tambourines, and megaphones, they offer a distinctly Minnesotan take on a New Orleans–style jazz funeral’s second line: a community mourning together, conjuring joy, and staying warm, all at once.
Alsa Bruno ’12, bullhorn at his lips, belts out raucous versions of “Down by the Riverside,” the O’Jays’ “Love Train,” and Sam Cook’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” For the past year, he’s been one of the lead singers of Brass Solidarity, a street activist brass band that formed in 2021 in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd. And during the Operation Metro Surge immigration crackdown, it has played nearly every day, at memorials for Renee Good and Alex Pretti, on picket lines, at mutual aid benefits, in Washington, D.C., while lobbying Congress for reduced Department of Homeland Security funding, and, every Monday, at George Floyd Square. Their Nokomis jam has resonated far beyond Minneapolis, even catching the attention of President Barack Obama, who hailed it as “an embodiment of the values that make us care about other people.”
“It’s the role of the artist to make the revolution irresistible,” Bruno says, a sentiment he credits to the thinking of activists Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara. “By coming together in music, by coming together, serving one another, and dancing even when we’re sad. By moving our bodies, by letting trauma not stay locked up inside of us.”
It’s the joy that makes it irresistible, says Bruno’s wife, Morgan, a clarinetist with the band. “Brass Solidarity plays music with all of our feelings, including joy. Everything is valuable in service of caring for each other, even in music, and our neighbors care about each other, so of course they want to join our sound!”
Bruno was a member of the a cappella group Intertwining Melodies at Carleton, but says he wasn’t much of a singer (he started out with Brass Solidarity on a kazoo before someone heard him sing and handed him a megaphone). A Cinema and Media Studies/Theater double major with an education concentration, he was most interested in connecting with people, which led to work with the Office of Intercultural and International Life and to spreading laughter with the sketch comedy group Lenny Dee. Today he keeps pulling those threads as an antiracist educator, theater artist, and improv comedian. Linking all this work? “Simply, joy.”
While the all-volunteer Brass Solidarity is racially diverse, most of its songs have origins in the Civil Rights movement and the Black church before it. “We’re going back to these songs because we’re not waiting for someone else to introduce our kids to liberation,” he says. “‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around’ is about standing on mission, keeping the faith.’ ‘This Little Light of Mine’ is a cute song we sing about candles and church, but it says: you are shining, my neighbor. Your identity deserves to be shown, to be celebrated, to be protected. ‘Hold On’ invites you to believe that the change is coming, but also: don’t wait. Your hope needs you to hold on and live beyond this ephemeral circumstance.”
As a near-full moon rises over Nokomis, Bruno leads a call and response to that last song, “Hold On (Change is Coming),” by Minneapolis’s Sounds of Blackness: “Hold on, we gonna make it!” “Hold on, we gonna make it!” Then, a drone is heard from above as a plane appears on its descent into Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and Bruno shouts, “Show the airplane we mean business!” As the crowd turns to face it, a thousand hands shoot into the air, singing and swaying in unison, an exuberant invitation to viewers in the sky: Join us!