The selectors said: Their original blend of New Orleans funk, jazz and eclectic remakes of hits from the  ’70s and ’80s, with a seamless blend of virtuosity and humor, brings everyone to their feet. The group’s inspired rowdy energy fits well inside a club or gallery, or marching down the street with the visiting Bread and Puppet theater company.

So you take a drummer and studio producer from New Orleans by way of California, and you team him with a trombonist from Chicago by way of Hampton, put them on stages in jazz clubs or gutter punk venues, and you let them blow, man, blow.

“Luckily, all my friends make up a band,” says Reggie Pace, co-founder of No BS Brass, who has the VCU Jazz Orchestra and the Devil’s Workshop on his resume. “I knew just enough trumpet players and just enough trombone players.”

Drummer Lance Koehler, who worked with Hotel X and the Oregon Hill Funk All-Stars and moved his Minimum Wage recording studio here from New Orleans, puts it like this: “No fuss, no electricity, no gimmicks, just raw music, raw brass, people coming to play music together, not explore their egos.”

That Richmond produced this group is to the credit of its musical ferment. Out of the city’s stew of punk and metal groups, bluegrass and assorted musical experiments came No BS. Its huge, bright sound seems more Bourbon Street than Broad Street, but Pace says that hasn’t hurt: “We’ve gotten no resistance to what we do.” He adds with a laugh, “People seem to want us around.”

The group’s first gig, April 15, 2006, was at the ADA Gallery, and since then they’ve appeared at Emilio’s, The National and a post-Jefferson-Jackson Dinner event at The Camel. No BS’ sheer exuberance and repertoire of jazz, hip-hop and classic rock gets even staid Richmond audiences up and moving.

“No two chords are played exactly alike,” Pace says. “This music is living and breathing.”   

11th Annual Theresa Pollak Prize Recipients:

Lifetime Achievement  Photography  Words  Arts Innovator  Vocalist  Ensemble  Fine Arts  Dance  Theater  Film  Emerging Artist  Applied Arts