Motorsports Park regularly hosts Kart racing, too
April 3, 2013
Andrew Calise Freeman
April 8, 2013
Mark Levron’s cheeks flush red each time he returns home to see his name atop the billing of a concert by The Upstarts.
The Vandebilt Catholic graduate squirms each time he’s sold in Houma as the frontman for the New Orleans-based band, which consists of five members from various parts of the country, friends and partners he’s made over the course of his music career.
The Upstarts, he insists, are not Mark Levron the Trumpeter and his boys, but instead are a tight group of former “A-list side guys” who melded together to run on their own terms, devised the band and incubated their funk-soul, vocal-focused sound for the last two years.
Now the original tunes are starting to flow, the gigs away from their Frenchmen Street base are multiplying and what’s next is approaching ever more quickly. The hometown-boy-returning-home-with-his-musically-inclined-friends angle cheapens talent of the blossoming band.
“We all have experience playing at a really high level,” Levron says. “Everyone is an excellent side-man, so it’s very easy for us to support each other. We wanted to be a band. That doesn’t happen so much any more.”
Keyboardist Phil Breen, drummer and lead singer Kyle Sharamitaro, and Levron, a trumpet player since the fourth grade, formed The Upstarts’ core group. They’re close in age, in contrast to the older guitarist Ian Cunningham and bassist Scott Jackson, who round out the group.
“It’s kind of two different dynamics. We have the hungry, got-to-get-it-done 29-year-olds and then the 38-year-olds are like, ‘Yeah, it’s cool.’
Levron first picked up the trumpet for the school band in fourth grade, when his mother eliminated drums from consideration. His father, Al, has long played trumpet and piano, and as Mark grew older, dad took him to music festivals and to his own concert gigs backing up the likes of R&B legend Ernie K. Doe, Mark says.
After graduating Vandebilt, Mark went to Nicholls in pursuit of a degree in business. He graduated college but has never held a fulltime job outside of music, something for which is father ribs him. Instead of an 8-to-5-er, Levron has toured the country with talented musicians, backing up Josh Garrett for a while and playing regular gigs in Nashville while doing so. Incessant touring isn’t appealing to the newly engaged Levron, but playing music is still his life.
“I feel like it’s almost like I was born to do it,” he says.
The business education does lend itself to his profession, a trumpet player in an independent band. Levron earnestly handles the marketing of the band, er, brand and doesn’t indulge in the rock-star aspects of a musician’s life as much as he used to. The Upstarts, he says, are focused on growing and becoming a serious player on the New Orleans scene, not merely playing to subsidize partying born from arrested development.
They’re starting to make progress. Levron says the band is nearly ready to release its first album, a live recording of cover songs from Old Pointe Bar in New Orleans last November. Between gigs along the Gulf Coast, The Upstarts are in the studio laying down their original music.
As the opening act for Houmapalooza, the all-independent, all-original concert in downtown Houma, the band will strictly play their own music. Levron says the band is comfortable enough to play seven or eight original tunes.
Orthodoxy has never been a factor for The Upstarts, Levron says. Sharamitaro, the drummer, is the lead singer, harkening Instead of focusing on jamming like a number of bands in the city, they make a concerted effort to emphasize vocals.
“We had a vision of not being like every other New Orleans band. We didn’t want to be an instrumental funk band. … We wanted to be a singing band. We wanted to separate ourselves from the jamming thing, which we do jam, we do get funky, we do play instrumentals, but we really wanted to separate ourselves and become singers.
“I’m a musician; I’m not a trumpet player,” Levron says. “If it’s reggae, it’s rap, it’s zydeco, whatever it is, there should be a place for any instrument. It’s not that this instrument goes well with this. Music is music. It’s open.”
Keyboardist Phil Breen, dummer and lead singer Kyle Sharamitaro, guitarist Ian Cunningham, bassist Scott Jackson and trumpeter Mark Levron comprise The Upstarts!. The New Orleans-based band plays its original music APril 6 as the opening act of Houmapalooza.
