On Friday night at 6:15, the Union Terrace came alive with the crazy antics and distinctive music of Mucca Pazza, a 30 piece marching band like none other. Their uniforms, inspired by both marching band and civil war uniforms, were colorful, saucy, and utterly mismatched. The band moved and interacted in a similar manner of organized chaos–though all of it was one with the utmost enthusiasm (especially their one cheerleader–a peppy little fireball dressed in red, white, and blue). The instrumentation included mostly concert band instruments like the trombone, trumpet, sousaphone, and clarinet, as well as a comprehensive percussion section with marching snare drums, a bass drum, concert toms, crash cymbals, a glockenspiel, an accordion, a violin, a mandolin, an electric guitar…and the list goes on. The unique part about Mucca Pazza, though, is not the instruments they play, but the way in which they play them.

Their show started out with most of the members dispersed through the crowd. When they started playing, this created a surround-sound effect with emphasis on different instruments. Those with a trombone next to their ear got to hear more of the trombone part, those with a soprano saxophone at their side got to hear more of the treble part, and so on. This way, the musical experience that this self-described “circus punk marching band” brought to the stage was slightly different for each audience member.

The music itself was an aggregation of several different genres performed in the band’s distinctive style, which is a John Phillip Sousa take on Led Zeppelin, with interspersed Indian and Arabic sounds, all shadowed with a backtrack of a Japanese arcade, or maybe the soundtrack to a Scooby Doo movie. The low sounds of the trombones, sousaphone, and baritone saxophone blare out like so many buzzing bees while the soprano saxophone, with its reedy sound, tops out the pitch spectrum. The rest of the instruments file in somewhere in between and somehow out of it all comes a coherent melody.

While your average marching band will be trained not to show the slightest emotion and keep a visage of stone throughout the show, these guys do the exact opposite. Each member has a distinct personality, and they do their very best to let every intoxicating inch of it shine through. Their energy was infectious, and before long there was a growing clutch of brave audience members up and on their feet, busting out the moves near the front of the terrace stage. You find yourself musing about the quandary of how they manage to stay so in sync while still appearing to be in complete shambles (also about how their trombone players managed to play while jumping up and down). The audience Friday night had their ears blasted, delighted, scrubbed out, and made fresh, because the music of Mucca Pazza is like nothing they had ever heard before, or probably will since. It’s the sound that earned them a spot at the Madison World Music Festival 2009, and will hopefully continue to build respect and fame for years to come.