Name any established musician today and either they, or someone they are connected to, probably knows Tripp Bratton.
The March Madness Marching Band music director, aka Minister of the Grooves, has cultivated professional ties from North America to South America to Africa, and back again, since landing on the Lexington music scene as a university music major in the early 1980s. Even those who may not know the percussionist personally have likely been influenced by the same folks who have impacted his career.
Just think of it as six degrees of separation from Tripp.
Bratton’s influence is a tribute to his reputation. Anyone who has witnessed the exhaustive repertoire of work developed by the percussionist, composer, arranger, producer, and educator knows that he is a marvel of talent and skill. Years of work in rhythm fusion, contemporary percussion, and African-Latin percussion has placed him in the studio or on the stage with such greats as late Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, Grammy winner Bela Fleck, and Rolling Stones’ legendary producer Chris Kimsey.
And that’s the short list.
The Lexington drummer phenom’s deep love for African percussion has also led to more than 25 years of study and performance with Ghanian master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie, Bratton’s mentor and friend with whom he performed for late South African President Nelson Mandela in Chicago in 1993. Only Bratton’s relationship with Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Gail Wynters, he will tell you, has been more influential to his overall development.
Wynters, who is Bratton’s mother, has collaborated with her son on more than a few innovative projects. The song “We Will Survive”—recorded by MMMB in 2018 as part of Ten in Twenty: A Lexington Recording Project, and now streaming on the web and on the MMMB website—was written by Wynters, Bratton, and his brother, guitarist Arte Bratton. MMMB performed the song live at a fundraiser in early 2019 at Lexington’s historic Lyric Theatre, with Wynters on vocals.
Bratton says he sees his leadership of the music side of MMMB as an opportunity to take his professional experience and parlay it into service to the broader community. His first involvement with what would officially become MMMB in late 2009 began after then-Local First Lexington Vice President Lori Houlihan asked Bratton to lead a group of musicians in the 2008 Lexington Christmas Parade.
“I had been doing percussion arrangements and wind arrangements for high school bands and had just written an original show for the Paris (Bourbon County) high school band that fall,” Bratton recalls. A portion of that score would later become the foundation for MMMB’s “Lord of the Hoops” show first performed in 2013.
Apart from MMMB, stage work, and writing or arranging, Bratton spends most of his waking hours teaching. He is part of the music faculty at both Berea and Centre colleges and teaches group classes throughout the area. One of his most recognized classes is a community African percussion workshop using the “djembe”—an African rope-tuned drum played with the fingers and palms—that he has taught for many years at the Living Arts and Science Center in Lexington.
If asked, Bratton will say he doesn’t have a favorite MMMB memory because there have been too many good memories to count. MMMB’s 2009 performance at the Forecastle music festival in Louisville and several tours to the HONK!TX community street band fest in Austin, TX were great experiences, he says, but he shies away from calling any show the band’s best.
“Anytime joy and our unique flavor of madness get spread around and lifts someone’s spirits is a favorite moment,” he says. “There’s been so much fun over the last decade with some of the greatest folks I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.”
We’re happy to know him, too.