Tarace Boulba. Sounds like a sweet Turkish dessert. It's actually one funky brass band from France.

Technically, they consider themselves a "fanfare," spelled like fanfare, but in French it means a brass ensemble.

Tarace Boulba sounds like Balkan wedding music...if it were played by African and African-American funk musicians.

The group was founded in the outskirts of Paris in 1993.

It has 800 members, most of them non-professional, all of them very committed.

So committed, they're unpaid.

They actually pay...a membership fee of 15 euros (or 20 bucks), and they're in the band, for life.

This week, some of the members from the collective are completing their first North American tour.

They were tracing the roots of their sounds -- Afro-American funk -- from New Orleans to Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York.

Nina Beziau and Youssef Zeraoui of Tarace Boulba, take it away.

The French funk brass band Tarace Boulba will perform, Saturday May 30, in Brooklyn, NY at:

Rubulad
338 Flushing Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205