Sounds of the holidays: Canadian Brass brings 'Making Spirits Bright' to Popejoy

Get into the holiday spirit with a festive concert by Canadian Brass.

The brass quintet brings its cheerful performance, “Making Spirits Bright,” to Popejoy Hall on Friday, Dec 13. The group, made up of founding member Chuck Daellenbach on tuba, Jeff Nelson on the French horn, Keith Dyrda on trombone, Joe Burgstaller on trumpet and newest member Mikio Sasaki on the trumpet, will perform original arrangements and signature takes on holiday classics including “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “Charlie Brown Christmas,” “Silver Bells,” “Songs of Hanukkah” and “Jingle Bell Rock.”

Sounds of the holidays: Canadian Brass brings 'Making Spirits Bright' to Popejoy

“We’re in the middle of our six-week holiday tour all across the United States and Canada, and we are in a very privileged and happy position to be performing for thousands of people everywhere we go,” Burgstaller said. “And we’re really looking forward to coming to Albuquerque. It is one of our favorite stops.”

Canadian Brass enjoys a very rich history of wonderful arrangements from past arrangers and composers, Dyrda said. The quintet worked closely with composer and orchestrator Luther Henderson, who worked with Duke Ellington, and has had quintet members act as arrangers.

“Joe is an arranger on many of the charts that we play in the show and so it’s been an ongoing process, in that respect, of continually sort of adding to our repertoire and having more and more to play and also returning to our classic repertoire that we’re known for performing,” Dyrda said. “And so it’s a mix of many generations of wonderful composers and arrangers.”

When the group started, there was literally no repertoire for the brass quintet, Burgstaller said.

“Instead of being a limitation, this actually freed the group and continues to free us up,” he added. “We have what we call a masterworks approach, which (means) we take the best classical and crossover pieces into the jazz realm in the history of music, and we adapt them authentically for our group.”

The quintet’s goal is excellence in brass music, Dyrda said.

“We like to present classical repertoire at a very high level and also be able to cross over into different genres, jazz and pop, and be able to bridge that gap,” he continued. “We find that it works very well for being able to introduce our audiences to new types of repertoire that they might not have heard yet, but always tied together with the highest level of performance.”

The quintet is more than 50 years strong. Each of its members, with the exception of Daellenbach, who is a founding member, grew up watching Canadian Brass.

“In my case, I’ve watched them on PBS, and Canadian Brass was the pioneer in the brass quintet world, it really invented and popularized the genre across the world,” Burgstaller said. “It is the world’s most famous quintet.”

Becoming part of the quintet changed how Burgstaller and other members approached their instruments.

“It influenced the way we played,” he said. “It opened up a whole new world of possibilities as to what we actually could do with our instruments, because the virtuosity of the group is one of the hallmarks of the group. We saw that growing up and we are continuing the tradition, which is essentially in our DNA at this point, because the group that we are a part of is a very big influence to us.”