Tonight at The Camel, Richmond’s own No BS Brass Band celebrates the release of its CD Alive in Richmond. And man, are they.

No BS in 2008 received the ensemble award of the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts, and I wrote then:

“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. … 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 [co-founding trombonist Reginald] 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.’ ”

My Bourbon-Broad comparison, upon reflection, now seems a bit uncharitable. I mean, why shouldn’t Richmond have its own brass-band oeuvre? The House of Praise brass from Church Hill regularly held forth in Carytown a couple of summers ago and rendered almost anybody incapable of standing still when next to them. Their music was transcendent for a different reason, though.

No BS is just sheer musical joy, a physical incantation, a grand, shiny evocation of life affirmation, delivered by the trombone’s tuning slides, jabbing like bayonets at the doldrums. That’s what I call a stimulus package.