We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

The brotherhood of the eight young men who make up the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is literal. They’re all sons of Phil Cohran, a legendary Chicago trumpeter who turned his back on commercial music to pursue astral jazz (with Sun Ra), proto-funk, and Black consciousness. But Cohran’s ultimate avant-garde experiment was with his own sons. They lived an insular communal existence with Cohran and their two mothers—“Mama Maia” and “Mama Aquilla”—complete with homemade clothes, vegeterianism, and invented holidays. Starting at age three, the boys also joined the family band. Rehearsals began each morning at 5:00.

It’s tempting to dub them the “anti-Jackson 5.” Joe Jackson whipped his sons (sometimes literally) into a pop act destined for top-of-the-charts success; Phil Cohran, with nonviolent means, melded a category-defying brass band in order to shield his sons from the dangers of their South Side ghetto and from the corrupt dog-eat-dog marketplace. In the process, their father would teach them “to create sounds that would fuse with the body and heal the soul,” and to serve as an inspiration for all families and children seeking something better.

Phil Cohran’s lessons did have some things in common with Joe Jackson’s: he expected greatness from his sons, and taught them they were different—indeed better—than others. He trained them to rely on each other and to mistrust outsiders. Whatever the ambitions, it’s a lot for a group of young boys to shoulder.

Now the boys are grown up, in their 20’s and 30’s. When they raise eight brass bells to the sky, they make music that is at once indescribably joyful, unremittingly exciting, and undeniably together. It’s also a unique blend of often-disparate black-music currents, from jazz to soul to funk to hip-hop. In this purely musical realm, Phil Cohran’s experiment in brotherhood has definitely borne fruit.

But there’s more to a life in music, and to life in general. As the brothers try to make their own way in the wide world—whether playing for quarters in Times Square, wowing a jazz festival in Amsterdam, collaborating with Mos Def and Damon Albarn or negotiating with managers and record labels—they find the ideals their father bred into them tested and tested again. Indeed, they must question whether their fathers’ values really are their own.

Brotherhood, whether biological or ideological, is never easy. Brothers Hypnotic is a coming-of-age story—for eight young men, and for an ideal.