The Musical Box

Onstage at Headliners Music Hall in Louisville just before 2 this morning were roughly a dozen members of Chicago’s self-proclaimed “circus punk marching band” Mucca Pazza in action. But they only made up the rhythm team - the core groove merchants playing guitar, glockenspiel, sousaphone, violin and accordion - and its two-woman cheerleading squad.

But up in the balcony, blowing like mad, was the trombone section. In the back, standing atop the bar, were sax players adding their own brassy calamity to this live-action, sense-a-round, Derby morning soiree.

You couldn’t keep track of how many players the band had on board for the show. It advertised a performance crew of 30. The number seemed closer to the low 20s this morning. But with musicians constantly milling through the crowd - like Mucca Pazza’s “K12″ percussion section, which initiated the concert-opening Carousel with a beat of merry, slamming thunder - it was tough to get an accurate head count. Suffice to say, it was sizable lot.

Shoot, the band is so huge that we had to place its promo photo, at left, on its side just to get everybody in.

As for the music, Mucca Pazza - which is Italian for “crazy cow” - proved to be a marching band that dodged any sense of convention. Yes, they dressed predominantly in uniforms, none of which even remotely matched. And bandleader Mark Messing, instead of playing bass, handled the bottom end for much of the 65 minute set on sousaphone. But then there were the guitars, the ensemble’s preferences for gyrations and shimmies and a repertoire that touched on funk, ska, rhumba, Balkan folk, surf and klezmer music as well as covers by such unfathomably disparate artists as Nubian singer/bandleader Ali Hassan Kuban and Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich.

This sure wasn’t like any marching band that played at my school.

But for all its seemingly novel performance profile - clarinetist/saxophonist Eve Monzingo was dressed like Gilda Radner’s Lisa Lupner character while trombonist Elanor Leskiw zipped through the audience looking like she was ready to hoist her instrument like a javelin - Mucca Pazza’s music was serious stuff.

On Coat Czech, the band took a traditional Balkan gypsy brass tune (called a “cocek”) and matched it with a cheery, incantatory shout from the cheerleaders. For Alarm!, an original group tune, drums and spasmodic guitar provided a sense of punkish nerve. And for the final encore, the purposely cartoon-like Nod to Magoo (which bore the greatest reflection of a sunny marching band in full stride), the band filled out of the club - a herd of happily crazed cows that had just ushered in one of Derby Day’s first and, to be sure, most inventive parties.